My Heart Wanders


Book Description

What would happen if one day you decided to follow your heart? Where would it take you? Author Pia Jane Bijkerk takes us on her journey as she leaves her comfortable life in Sydney to follow, unconditionally, her instincts. Setting up home first in Paris, then on a houseboat in Amsterdam, Pia observes the serendipitous moments that only present themselves when you let go and follow your dreams. With beautiful photographs from her travels in France, Amsterdam, Belgium, Italy and Sydney, My Heart Wanders is a reflective, inspirational, tender memoir that speaks to “the wandering heart” in all of us.




If Your Mind Wanders at Mass


Book Description

Distractions, fatigue, boredom at Sunday worship -- maybe we experience these because we don't fully appreciate what's going on at Mass. This profound and practical look at the liturgy focuses our wandering minds. It reminds us that at Mass the veil separating heaven and earth lifts, so that we stand with angels and saints in the presence of God Most High.




The Wandering Mind


Book Description

Corballis argues that mind-wandering has many constructive and adaptive features. These range from mental time travel?the wandering back and forth through time, not only to plan our futures based on past experience, but also to generate a continuous sense of who we are--to the ability to inhabit the minds of others, increasing empathy and social understanding. Through mind-wandering, we invent, tell stories, and expand our mental horizons. Mind wandering , hardly the sign of a faulty network or aimless distraction, actually underwrites creativity, whether as a Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, or an Einstein imagining himself travelling on a beam of light. Corballis takes readers on a mental journey in chapters that can be savored piecemeal, as the minds of readers wander in different ways, and sometimes have limited attentional capacity.




Like a Bird Wanders


Book Description

A story so powerful, it took three authors to tell it. A dark secret was hidden in their upstanding family... December 18, 1966 Grace Rose McFarlane, a long-time resident of the small town of Yacolt, Washington, and the middle McLeod sister, is dying. Her very last act is to leave a cryptic handwritten warning for her great-granddaughter, who will be arriving soon for Christmas break: Julia, the lion will destroy you. But what does the note mean? Julia wonders as she grieves the death of the one woman who has loved her unconditionally. Through a stack of yellowing letters and journals in her grandmother's attic, Julia pieces together a shocking tale of rebellion and betrayal...and is determined to track down the truth. The tangled web she finds will forever alter her perspective on her family...and may save her from making a heartbreaking mistake of her own. Includes the Christmas story, What Do You Say to a King? featured by Focus on the Family. This story of a prodigal, and the family who loved her, will feed your soul and warm your heart. -MARION DUCKWORTH, author of Naked on God's Doorstep




The Wandering Goose


Book Description

"This is the perfect gift for anyone going through a breakup or other heartache. It is wonderful." Rose City Reader With its timeless story about love and the cycle of life, this beautiful little book will capture the hearts of readers young and old. A bug's life is suddenly changed when a wandering goose finds his way to her garden. They become close friends, exploring and playing in the lush garden, exchanging poems, hopes, and dreams, and eventually confessions of love. When goose begins to feel his instinct to wander, Bug's life changes again, but she comes to learn that she is surrounded by enduring love, even in loss. With charming illustrations by Frida Clements in a style reminiscent of Beatrix Potter, this beautiful little hardcover book is a beautiful gift for anyone who's ever loved and lost love.




River, Cross My Heart


Book Description

Five-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. River, Cross My Heart, which marks the debut of a wonderfully gifted new storyteller, weighs the effect of Clara's absence on the people she has left behind: her parents, Alice and Willie Bynum, torn between the old world of their rural North Carolina home and the new world of the city, to which they have moved in search of a better life for themselves and their children; the friends and relatives of the Bynum family in the Georgetown neighborhood they now call home; and, most especially, Clara's sister, ten-year-old Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions stirred by her sister's death as she struggles to decide what kind of woman she will become. This highly accomplished first novel resonates with ideas, impassioned lyricism, and poignant historical detail as it captures an essential part of the African-American experience in our century.




Wonders on My Wanders


Book Description

When I chose to use poetry as an art form to express my inner feelings, my surroundings and my experiences, I never knew how it will become an important part of my life. However, I found myself writing almost religously everyday for a year and the result is this anthology of poems. Of course poetry takes different forms and its definition has provoked controversy since antiquity. Personally I see poetry as a synergy of words in a symbiotic relationship arranged sequentially and synchronously to produce a visual and mental aesthetic effect that may gladden the heart or provoke the mind into deep musings. Whatever the definition it is an art form available to almost everyone. The relative shortness of poems allows for the concentration of the deepest feelings in a potent and highly concentrated mix. I started writing this anthology following the deeply painful separation from my ex-wife and subsequent divorce. I wanted something cathartic more powerful than a simple diary to track and express my innermost fears, Love and sadness during the divorce process and this anthology was born. I was mainly influenced by the sonnets of William Shakespeare, the Odes of John Keats, the modernist romantic poems of Mihai Eminescu and lastly but not the least, the controversial poems of Charles Baudelaire. I hope this poetical semi-autobiography, touches everyone that reads it in a personal way.




Virgil Wander


Book Description

A man seeks to rediscover his broken Midwestern community in a novel that “brims with grace and quirky charm” by the author of Peace Like a River (Bookpage). Movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Though Virgil survives, his language and memory are altered. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together the past. He is helped by a cast of curious locals—from a stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son, to the vanished man’s enchanting wife, to a local journalist who is Virgil’s oldest friend. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town. Leif Enger conjures a remarkable portrait of a region and its residents, who, for reasons of choice or circumstance, never made it out of their defunct industrial district. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures including movies, fishing, necking in parked cars, playing baseball and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a journey into the heart of America’s Upper Midwest.




Money Wanders


Book Description

Jonah Eastman, disgraced Presidential pollster, is summoned home to Atlantic City by his ailing grandfather Mickey Price--a legendary Atlantic City gangster and owner of the Golden Prospect casino. When Mickey dies, Jonah is "persuaded" by mob boss Mario Vanni to help improve his image by launching a misinformation campaign aimed at gaining public acceptance and ultimately a way "outta the life." So Jonah goes to war through a comical and audacious manipulation of the media which includes online rumoring, exploiting romantic myths of the mob, and orchestrating a union-backed pseudo-vigil after Vanni is arrested. To pull off these stunts, he enlists the help of his grandfather's Prohibition-era cronies, pimply-faced hackers, a disgruntled Secret Service agent, a cagey Washington lobbyist, a slick Philadelphia publicist, and a street-fighting rabbi. Money Wanders is a wild and uproarious tour of spin and media manipulation from the lobbied halls of Congress to the dilapidated boardwalk of Atlantic City.




Eat My Heart Out


Book Description

Meet 2014's most outrageous, funny and shocking anti-heroine: Ann-Marie. She's 23, her life has collapsed, and she's blaming everyone but herself. Heartbroken, skint and furious, she's convinced that love - sweet love! - is the answer to all of her problems, until she meets legendary feminist Stephanie Haight, a woman who could be her saviour - or her final undoing. From neo-burlesque pop-up strip clubs, to ironic Little Mermaid-themed warehouse parties via ritual worship ceremonies summoning ancient power goddesses, disastrous one night stands with extravagantly unsuitable men, naked cleaning jobs, a forced appearance on Woman's Hour and baby boomer house parties in Islington, Ann-Marie hurtles through London and life, urged on by Stephanie, who is convinced that if she can save Ann-Marie she'll rescue an entire generation from the curse of ironic detachment. Fiercely clever and unapologetically wild, Eat My Heart Out is the satire for our narcissistic, hedonistic, post-post-feminist era.