Love and Other Sins


Book Description

Mina's life is going according to plan; she's acing AP Calc and is perfectly content with her nonexistent social life. Though only a high school junior, Mina knows time is an investment, and she's putting all her capital into academics. Oliver, a child abuse survivor who grew up in the foster care system, is ready to burn down his old life and start from scratch-complete with a new name and emancipation papers-in L.A. When the two are thrown together through circumstance and develop an unexpected connection, they discover how hard it is to keep the past in the past. Love and Other Sins is an emotional coming-of-age YA drama about family, love, violence, and the residue of abuse set against the backdrop of contemporary Los Angeles. When Mina meets Oliver, you'll remember your own first love and just how fast it swept you under. What were the bonds that bound us? Was it purely physical attraction? Circumstance? Or perhaps it was a mutual gravitation toward inevitable pain. "There was something about her-her eyes. Well, not so much her eyes, physically, but more like what they said about her: she had this look-a kind of restless intensity." "It was intimate . . . a strange and beautiful feeling. We were breathing life into each other." Love and Other Sins is a moving story about what it means to be young and vulnerable in today's society. This young adult romance will make you laugh and cry and give you hope for tomorrow because there are people like Mina and Oliver who refuse to let themselves be defined by their pasts or circumstances. If you love reading books like Looking for Alaska or Thirteen Reasons Why, then this is definitely for you. Content warning: sexual assault, recollections of child abuse, discussions of suicidal thoughts, and mention of miscarriage.




Work and Other Sins


Book Description

Pulitzer Prize-winning "New York Times" reporter Charlie LeDuff gives his incomparable take on the city and its denizens-the bars, the workingmen, the gamblers, the eccentrics, the lonesome, and the wise. "Work and Other Sins" is filled to burst with stories of the fascinating, one-of-a-kind characters who populate the modern metropolis. In these pages we meet a Long Island used-car salesman; a professional Santa; the men who change the light bulbs atop the Empire State Building; a Sinatra imitator; a retired Harlem chorus-line girl; a lighthouse keeper; a saloon priest; Latin lovers; a host of barroom regulars; and myriad others-all of whom present their take on working, drinking, gambling, dying, and countless other facts of life. Charlie LeDuff takes us to the watering holes, prisons, veterans' hospitals, firehouses, apartment buildings, baseball fields, and graveyards that make up the landscape of modern life. Also included is LeDuff's acclaimed series of articles on Squad One, the Brooklyn firehouse that suffered devastating losses on September 11, as well as his Pulitzer Prize-winning piece on workers in a North Carolina slaughterhouse. LeDuff captures the spirit of the people and places he profiles with a dead-on feel for character and idiom and his signature wry wit. But more than that, LeDuff lets his characters speak for themselves. What results is at turns riotous, dirt-under-the-nails, contemplative, salty, joyous, whiskey tinged-an utterly unique vision of life in the Big Apple and beyond.




Of Love and Other Demons


Book Description

AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN eBOOK! On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria – the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport – is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love – and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.




A Book About Love


Book Description

“Jonah Lehrer has a lot to offer the world….The book is interesting on nearly every page….Good writers make writing look easy, but what people like Lehrer do is not easy at all.” —David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review Science writer Jonah Lehrer explores the mysterious subject of love. Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer’s A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives. Love confuses and compels us—and it can destroy and define us. It has inspired our greatest poetry, defined our societies and our beliefs, and governs our biology. From the way infants attach to their parents, to the way we fall in love with another person, to the way some find a love for God or their pets, to the way we remember and mourn love after it ends, this book focuses on research that attempts, even in glancing ways, to deal with the long-term and the everyday. The most dangerous myth of love is that it’s easy, that we fall into the feeling and then the feeling takes care of itself. While we can easily measure the dopamine that causes the initial feelings of “falling” in love, the partnerships and devotions that last decades or longer remain a mystery. This book is about that mystery. Love, Lehrer argues, is not built solely on overwhelming passion, but, fascinatingly, on a set of skills to be cultivated over a lifetime.




All Other Sins


Book Description

FROM AMAZON #1 BESTSELLING THRILLER AUTHOR, JK ELLEM. Sociopath, psychopath, narcissist? -- Diane Miller is having a rough time figuring out which one her husband is. So when the ordinary housewife from Nebraska, finds a bag of cash on the side of the road and has the chance to run, to flee, to leave her husband, her loveless marriage and her hopeless life behind, she takes it.The problem is Diane's husband, Greg, isn't any of the things she thinks he is.He is all three....The people whose money she has taken want to find Diane too. Alex Romano is the Harvard educated, Consigliere of the Romano crime family from New Jersey. As her father's only daughter and most trusted advisor, she wields significant influence within the family hierarchy. But such influence doesn't extend to her older brother, Vincent Romano, the heir apparent, whose raw ambition and brutal methods Alex has trouble controlling. Thrown together, brother and sister are tasked with tracking down the missing money. For Diane Miller to survive, she needs to become the person she knew she always could be, if given another chance--and if she can live long enough.Two women. Two opposite backgrounds. One collision course.All Other Sins, is the latest, "Up until 4:00 a.m., reading" thriller from Amazon #1 Bestselling Thriller Author, JK Ellem. How fast can you run?




When People Are Big and God Is Small


Book Description

Overly concerned about what people think of you? Edward T. Welch uncovers the spiritual dimension of people-pleasing—what the Bible calls fear of man—and points the way through a true knowledge of God, ourselves, and others.




Necessary Sins


Book Description

When Lynn Darling met Lee Lescaze at the Washington Post, they could not have been more different. He was older, married, more “establishment,” a celebrated foreign correspondent and editor. She, who entered Harvard at age sixteen, was a brilliant wild child of the sixties. She lived life in the present tense, where every affair was an adventure. Then Darling fell in love and everything changed. This is a story of the many lessons love can teach us, of a marriage turned upside down and inside out, and all the tenderness, thrills, comfort, and yes, even disappointment, that comes with the territory. Lynn Darling thought she knew the narrative of her own life, until it really began with her “one true north,” and now, ten years after his death, her story is still unfolding.




Dark Rooms


Book Description

The Secret History meets Sharp Objects in this stunning debut about murder and glamour set in the ambiguous and claustrophobic world of an exclusive New England prep school. Death sets the plot in motion: the murder of Nica Baker, beautiful, wild, enigmatic, and only sixteen. The crime is solved, and quickly—a lonely classmate, unrequited love, a suicide note confession—but memory and instinct won’t allow Nica’s older sister, Grace, to accept the case as closed. Dropping out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school in Hartford, Connecticut, from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer. Compulsively readable, Lili Anolik’s debut novel combines the verbal dexterity of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topic in Calamity Physics and the haunting atmospherics and hairpin plot twists of Megan Abbott’s Dare Me.




Sari and Sins


Book Description

Kareena is understandably nervous on her wedding night, when she will make love to her husband for the first time - but at least she knows her parents have chosen well. Samir is goodlooking, gentle and considerate - and, although she's met him only a few times, Kareena is confident she will grow to love him. But Samir has a secret. A secret in the shapely form of Cloey whom he's been dating for the past six years. Cloey isn't prepared to give up her man - or, more importantly, his bank balance without a fight. And she's prepared to fight very dirty indeed. Kareena, however, is not the timid little Indian bride Cloey had expected her to be. In fact, Cloey might just have met her match.




Sin & Chocolate


Book Description

Some people are ordained for greatness?Those people usually have a lot of drama in their life. Drama I happily do without. I live in a forgotten corner of nowhere for a reason: there is safety in anonymity. I have enough problems just trying to get by.But when Kieran, a sinfully sexy demigod at the pinnacle of power, crashes into my life, suddenly my whole world is turned upside down.He's harboring a deadly secret, one that could destroy all he holds dear. He thinks I'm the key to his salvation, and he wants me to help him claim vengeance.He also wants me with a passion that burns my body from the inside out.To ignore him is impossible, but to give in to my desires, even for a night, would thrust me into danger I might not survive.But can I resist the temptation?