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Cara Collins, a disenchanted single New York investment banker, tries to find something to smile about on her 27th birthday. Between a hostile work environment and her romantic conundrum, the joy has leaked out of her life. Cara’s heart has been entwined with close friend and first love, scientist Dr. Kai Solomon, for the last nine years. A married man she can never have. Before the day ends, she receives a letter from her long-dead grandmother telling her she has inherited $50 million . . . which must stay secret or those close to her could die. As Cara gets drawn deeper into the mystery behind her inheritance, the strings to the money are revealed when she discovers angels secretly living among us. While Cara deals with the revelations thrown at her, she meets sophisticated and refined Simon Young, who offers her the promise of romance for the first time since Kai. Cara’s worlds collide when Kai and his daughter are kidnapped by Lucifer’s minions, the Dark Ones. In order to save Kai and his daughter, Cara must choose to accept her place in a 2,000 year-old prophecy foretold in the Trinity Stones as the First of the Twelve who will lead the final battle between good and evil. In doing so, she finally realizes there are no coincidences and it’s not just her heart, but also her destiny, that are entwined with the two men in her life. Author: LG O’Connor Publication Date: April 22, 2014 -
The collection of essays in Flip-Flops After Fifty will immediately amuse, enlighten, and provoke the reader to think about the topics that affect all of us. This writer has experienced some of life’s painful jabs and has come through it all with strength, humor, and having learned a lesson or two. And she’s happy to share these lessons with others. Who hasn’t dealt with the emotions from family events, stress from lousy jobs, or the bittersweet feelings when the kids leave home? Not to mention body image, high school reunions, and parenting. It’s all covered here in this first collection of personal and insightful essays. Chapters include: “Family”, “The Holidays” and “Fifty.” Eastman’s conversational style and easy humor tackle the sublime and the ridiculous, the sacred and the profane. After a certain age, and it’s no secret that it’s fifty, Eastman’s essays argue that attitudes change for the better. Making decisions gets easier, although there’s no guarantee that life does. Even so, her writing allows us to take a look at our own issues with the reassuring handholding of a confidante. This is a collection that you will want to keep for yourself as well as give to a friend. Author: Cindy Eastman Publication Date: April 8, 2014 -
“This is a tasty and revealing read that takes you behind the curtain for a valuable peek into what motivates some of the greatest chefs in America. With beautifully displayed heartfelt recipes that connect their food to their memories, Dawn manages to capture each chef's unique inspiration and aura.” —Chef Sanford D'amato, Founder, Sanford Restaurant, James Beard Foundation award winner for Best Chef: Midwest, and author, Good Stock: Life on a Low Simmer Away From the Kitchen offers a glimpse into the joys and pressures of a chef’s life—satisfying the curiosity of those swept up in the wave of America’s chef-obsession. Here, selected chefs from across the nation disclose some of their most personal dreams and talents—revealing who they are inside and outside the kitchen. With its uniquely personal approach, Away From the Kitchen will appeal to foodies everywhere, as well as readers who want it all: the menus, the recipes, and the chef “scoop.” Author: Dawn Blume Hawkes Publication Date: April 4, 2014 -
"Magnificent ... an exquisitely honest book." ―Newark Star-Ledger "There are so many who would benefit from Smolowe's emotional intelligence, warmth and wisdom." ―Dr. Lloyd Sederer, Medical Director, NY State Office of Mental Health, Huffington Post "No one would envy Smolowe's ordeal. But the way she handled it and writes about it? Very much so." ―New Jersey Monthly Four loved ones, gone, in the space of seventeen months. Unimaginable. But as journalist Jill Smolowe buried her husband, then her sister, mother, and mother-in-law, she had no trouble imagining what would follow. Films and memoirs, after all, offer only one script for the newly widowed: you fall apart. To Smolowe’s surprise and relief, that day never arrived. When friends insisted that her strength was “amazing,” she began to wonder if there was something freakish about her grief. Delving into modern bereavement research, she discovered a stunning bottom line: far from being uncommon, resilience like hers is the norm. In a story laced with humor, insight, and love, Smolowe finally gives voice to this silent majority. With a lens firmly trained on what helped her tolerate so much sorrow and rebound from so much loss, Smolowe jostles preconceptions about caregiving, defies clichés about grief, and offers often counterintuitive answers to those questions all of us eventually confront: What do I say? How can I help? How would I cope if it were me? Deeply moving and quietly wise, Four Funerals and a Weddingreminds us that grief is not only about endings—it’s about new beginnings. Author: Jill Smolowe Publication Date: April 8, 2014 -
Loveyoubye opens when Rossandra White’s husband of twenty-five years disappears, leaving behind a cryptic, hastily-written note on the kitchen counter, and then returns weeks later, offering few details about where he went. This sequence of events has played out before. Despite knowledge of at least one affair, she trusts he is being true to her and that their tumultuous marriage will endure. But this time is different. A subsequent confluence of crises rattles Rossandra’s core, shedding light on both the dark elements of their marriage and the direction her life must follow if she decides to leave her husband. In South Africa, land of her birth, Rossandra’s younger brother, whose physical and mental disabilities have stricken her with a lifetime of guilt, needs her help, and she answers the call. She returns to California where her dog Sweetpea, who for years has served as a vital emotional link between Rossandra and her husband, has begun to succumb to a fatal illness. Author: Rossandra White Publication Date: April 8, 2014 -
Why is it easier for a woman to be a muse than to have one? Are security and inspiration mutually exclusive? Can one be fully creative—in art or life—without the inspiration of erotic love? These are the questions asked in THE GEOMETRY OF LOVE, a novel set in New York in the 1980s, then fast-forwarding to Northern California 20 years later. Julia, an aspiring poet, is living with her British boyfriend Ben, a restrained professor at Princeton, when she is thrown off-balance by a chance meeting in Manhattan with Michael, a long-ago friend. A complex and compelling composer, Michael was once a catalyzing muse for her, but now returns as a destabilizing influence. Julia longs to become involved with Michael, but feels enormous guilt at the thought of betraying Ben and giving up the security of that relationship. When Michael signals he is too wounded to make a commitment, Julia turns her triangular situation into a square by setting him up with a cousin. In the process she discovers, as Pascal once said, that “the heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” This deeply psychological tale explores the surprising ways we make romantic choices. Author: Jessica Levine Publication Date: April 8, 2014 -
2014 PNBA Book Award Nominee: General 2015 IndieFab Winner: Finalist, General “A Tight Grip [is] a hilarious, high-drama novel with a delightful angle of approach to the inner workings of women in golf, family, and the positives and negatives of middle age.” —Books, Inc., The West's Oldest Independent Bookseller Some people might say that, at age 46, Jane “Par” Parker is too old to win golf tournaments; too old to fear her mother; and too old, after twenty years, to still feel heavy grief over the murder of her father. But Par has an obsessively tight grip on the past, and no one can tell her to live her life otherwise. Par is maniacally driven to win a golf tournament she hasn’t been able to win in ten years. Recent low-scoring rounds have strengthened her confidence. Distractions conspire against her: she spends a night in jail for a crime she blames on her husband; reads about her arrest on the front page; learns she has an enemy at the newspaper; and discovers shocking love affairs by those closest to her. A Tight Gripcelebrates the bonds of female friendships as Par Parker processes her life with her three closest friends. She discovers the transformative power of adversity, and seizes options to evolve as a person, an athlete, and a best friend. Author: Kay Rae Chomic Publication Date: June 10, 2014 -
“Her Name is Kaur pushes past the boundaries of romance to illuminate the love at the very heart of faith. In this groundbreaking book, Meeta Kaur has gathered a diverse and fresh group of stories of growing up Sikh and redneck, Sikh and queer, Sikh and daydreaming, Sikh and heartbroken, Sikh and deeply beloved. Whether discussing the everyday (mother-in-law conflicts) or the taboo (mental illness), these women writers share colorful, intense, and engaging adventures that range from Los Altos to Toronto to Chandigarh. This collection deserves a place on the shelf of everyone interested in South Asian cultures, women of America, and just good storytelling.” —Minal Hajratwala, author of Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents Sikh American women do the lion’s share of organizing and executing the business of the Sikh community, and they straddle multiple lives and worlds—cross-cultural, interreligious, intergenerational, occupational, and domestic—yet their experiences of faith, family, and community are virtually invisible in the North American milieu and have yet to be understood, documented, or shared. Until now. In Her Name is Kaur, Sikh American women explore the concept of love from many angles, offering rich, critical insight into the lives of Sikh women in America. Through a chorus of multi-generational voices—in essays ranging in tone from dramatic to humorous—they share stories of growing into and experiencing self-love, spiritual love, love within family, romantic love, the love they nurture for humanity and the world through their professional work, and more. Eye-opening and multifaceted, this collection of stories encourages its readers to take the feeling of love and turn it into action—practical action that will make the world a better place to be for everyone, regardless of their faith or creed. Author: Meeta Kaur Publication Date: June 17, 2014 -
These forty-eight powerful stories and poems etch in vivid detail the breakthrough moments experienced by women during the life-changing era that was the ’60s and ’70s. These women rode the sexual revolution with newfound freedom, struggled for identity in divorce courts and boardrooms, and took political action in street marches. They pushed through boundaries, trampled taboos, and felt the pain and joy of new experiences. And finally, here, they tell it like it was. From Vietnam to France, from Chile to England, from the Haight-Ashbury to Greenwich Village, and to the Deep South and Midwest, Times They Were A-Changing recalls the cultural reverberations that reached into farm kitchens and city “pads” alike—and in doing so, it celebrates the women of the ’60s and ’70s, reminding them of the importance of their legacy. Author: Linda Joy Myers Publication Date: September 8, 2013 -
When twenty-something artist Erica Mason moves from laid-back Mexico to Manhattan in the mid-1970s, she finds a hard-edged, decadent, and radically evolving art scene. Peppered with characters who could only come from the latter days of the “turn-on-and-drop-out” ’60s in then-crumbling New York (a spaced-out drummer who’s completely given up on using or making money, a radical feminist who glues animal furs to her paintings of vaginas, and icons in the making like Patti Smith), Erica’s New York is fast-moving, funny, and heartrending—just like the city itself. Ultimately, her rite of passage is not only a love affair with art, men, alcohol, drugs, and music in the swirl that was the downtown scene in a radically evolving era in New York, but also a resurrection from addiction and self-delusion. More than the study of a celebrated period of artistic expression, Cleans Up Nicely is the story of one gifted young woman’s path from self-destruction to a hard-won self-knowledge that opens up a whole new world for her—and helps her claim the self-respect that has long eluded her. Author: Linda Dahl Publication Date: August 5, 2013 -
2014 USA Best Book Awards: Nominee, Autobiography/Memoir Warrior Mother is the true story of a mother’s fierce love and determination, and her willingness to go outside the bounds of the ordinary when two of her three adult children are diagnosed with life-threatening diseases. When Sheila Collins’s best friend, dying of breast cancer, asked her to accompany her through what turned out to be the last fourteen days of her life, she didn’t know that the experience was preparing her for what laid ahead with her own children. In the years that followed, Collins had to face both her son’s diagnosis with AIDS and her daughter’s diagnosis with breast cancer. Warrior Mother documents how she faces these challenges and the issues accompanying them—from learning to be the mother of a gay son to visiting a healer in Brazil on her daughter’s behalf when she decides on bone marrow transplant treatment. Experience as a professional social worker and family therapist doesn’t always help Collins to cope with her children’s illnesses—but her relationship with improvisational song, dance, storytelling, and women’s spirituality rituals carries her through. Author: Sheila K. Collins Publication Date: August 6, 2013 -
The Enneagram—a universal symbol of human purpose and possibility—is an excellent tool for doing the hardest part of consciousness work: realizing, owning, and accepting your strengths and weaknesses. In this comprehensive handbook, Beatrice Chestnut, PhD, traces the development of the personality as it relates to the nine types of the Enneagram, the three different subtype forms each type can take, and the path each of us can take toward liberation. With her guidance, readers will learn to observe themselves, face their fears and disowned Shadow aspects, and work to manifest their highest potential. Author: Beatrice Chestnut Publication Date: July 31, 2013 -
“There is a magic at Hedgebrook and believe me, a major part of that magic is the food. I’ve always believed that good food equals good work. This book, just like Hedgebrook itself, is a gift for us all.” —Alice Sebold Hedgebrook is a literary nonprofit that supports the work of visionary women writers whose stories and ideas shape our culture now and for generations to come. Founded in 1988, Hedgebrook hosts a global community of writers through residencies and programs exclusively dedicated to supporting the creative process of women writers. Each evening, Hedgebrook residents gather in the farmhouse kitchen to share a home-cooked meal, their work, their process, and their stories. Meals at Hedgebrook are lovingly prepared using ingredients from Hedgebrook’s own organic garden. It is in this spirit that Hedgebrook devised the idea for The Hedgebrook Cookbook. Recipes from the kitchen and writing from our alumnae community, including Gloria Steinem, Jane Hamilton, Ruth Ozeki and others, bring the essence of radical hospitality from our farmhouse table to yours. Author: Denise Barr and Julie Rosten Publication Date: May 15, 2013 -
2013 IndieFab Gold Award: Winner, General Fiction Rebecca Lev, a Chicago psychotherapist, is balancing a heavy workload, two demanding kids, and an unhappy second marriage—so when she learns that her father, Charlie, is in trouble, it’s just one more worry to deal with. Charlie’s moved into a grand home in the Bay Area with his new wife, Vicky, and Rebecca’s convinced that her new stepmother is physically abusing her father—but Rebecca and Charlie have grown apart, and he rejects her offers of help. Years after marrying Vicky, Charlie dies of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Rebecca strongly suspects that his wife is implicated. Feeling guilty that she didn’t better protect her father, she returns to the Bay Area to investigate, vowing to find out what really happened. Author: Nan Fink Gefen Publication Date: May 1, 2013 -
“Parrish weaves linked, darkly humorous tales of aging, death, love and alcoholism using the gothic tropes of Southern literary fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews The 2013 International Books awards named Our Love Could Light The World a Finalist in the short story category. Our Love Could Light the World has been named on the Kirkus list of recommended books in the “Indie” category. You know the Dugans. They’re that scrappy family that lives down the street. Their yard is overgrown, they don’t pick up after their dog, their five children run free—leaving chaos in their wake—and the father hasn’t earned a cent in years. The wife holds them together on her income alone. You wouldn’t want them for neighbors—but from a distance, they’re quite entertaining. Set in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, the twelve linked stories of Our Love Could Light The World depict a dysfunctional family that’s messy and rude, cruel and kind, and loyal to the end. Author: Anne Leigh Parrish Publication Date: June 3, 2013 -
In Class Letters, we meet Anne English, single mom and high school English teacher (yes, she enjoys the irony). She loves the students she teaches, and hopes to not only educate them, but to prepare them for life after high school. In an attempt to connect with her senior English class on a deeper, more personal level, Anne begins to write them monthly letters, addressing intangibles such as honesty, gratitude, and love. To her surprise and delight, her students reply with heartfelt responses, sharing many of their personal challenges and successes. Author: Claire Chilton Lopez Publication Date: April 16, 2013 -
In 1991, Julia Wilkes, a zealous young reporter, covered the murder of a teenage girl in Fairbanks, Alaska. Julia’s stories relentlessly linked the girl’s boyfriend, Josh Harrison, to the crime—up to the day that the basketball star shot himself in the head. Twenty years later, Julia, now a Seattle journalism professor and syndicated columnist, comes back to Fairbanks on a sabbatical just in time to hear about a serial killer’s confession to the long-ago slaying. With Josh exonerated, Julia is haunted by whether her stories pushed him to end his life—and when a stalker begins to make attempts on her life, the stakes grow even higher. Suspects and motives abound: Julia’s enraged a pro-life group with a recent column; she’s drawn a jealous woman’s wrath; she’s unintentionally drawn the attention of a demented homeless person; and there’s always the possibility that someone from her past has come to collect vengeance for Josh’s death. Author: Patricia Watts Publication Date: March 19, 2013 -
“An alluring story of New York nightlife and its seedy players.” —Cat Marnell, VICE columnist “Equal parts Patti Smith’s Just Kids and The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Beautiful Garbage is a voyeuristic panorama of the vice and vanity of the downtown art scene in the 1980s.” —Ivy Pochoda, author of The Art of Disappearing and Visitation Street “Beautiful Garbage offers up one woman’s tour of duty of a New York City consumed by art, sex, and ambition. By turns passionate, cruel, shocking, and engrossing, this is a novel steeped in the lure of glamour and transformation the Big Apple’s always had to offer.” —Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of Women in Lust and Fast Girls Jodi Plum: smart, talented, ambitious, troubled. Fresh out of her teens, she leaves suburbia for Manhattan’s glam and gritty art scene, and almost immediately falls into the clutches of Monika, a beautiful photographer. With the help of her new mentor, Jodi quickly becomes a rising star—but when a skeleton from her past surfaces, her dream life crashes to a halt, and she slips into a world of parties, drugs, and high-class prostitution. Set in the crime-plagued New York City of the 1980s, Beautiful Garbage parallels an artist’s journey with her sexual epiphanies, exploring the notorious milieu of the decade’s downtown art scene from the point of view of a young female artist—and offering a satirical and irreverent look at post-’70s sexual politics and the world of elite call girls. Author: Jill Di Donato Publication Date: April 1, 2013 -
2013 IndieReader Discovery Awards: Winner, Best Travel Writing When an American woman and her British husband decide to buy a two-hundred-year-old cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds, they’re hoping for an escape from their London lives. Instead, their decision about whether or not to have a child plays out against a backdrop of village fêtes, rural rambles, and a cast of eccentrics clad in corduroy and tweed. Part memoir, part travelogue—and including field guides to narrative-related Cotswold walks–Americashire is a candid, compelling tale of marriage, illness, and difficult life decisions. Author: Jennifer Richardson Publication Date: March 4, 2013 -
“Memoir guru Linda Joy Myers packs a lot into this useful manual. This is more than a workbook full of exercises and prompts—it’s a guide from a veteran who understands the complexity of the memoir journey. If you’re writing a memoir, this workbook will become your new best friend.” —Brooke Warner, author of What’s Your Book? In Journey of Memoir you will find lessons on how to write a great scene; information on the difference between freewriting and outlining, and why you need both; timeline and turning point exercises to help create structure; and much more. This unique workbook gives you the tools you need to begin, develop, and complete your memoir. Author: Linda Joy Myers Publication Date: February 19, 2013 -
At 18, Tré Miller-Rodríguez gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. At 19, her only sibling was killed in a car crash. At 34, she lost her husband to a sudden heart attack. Then, at 36, her now-teenaged daughter found her on Facebook—and began to reshape the course of Tré’s life. With sharp, immediate prose, Tré unpacks the experience of being young and widowed in New York City: the “dumb sh*% people say”; the “brave face” she wears to work and social events; the solace she doesn’t find in one-night stands; and how her perspective only begins to shift when she spontaneously brings Alberto’s ashes on a trip and sets into motion the ritual of spreading him in bodies of water around the world. Author: Tré Miller Rodríguez Publication Date: March 5, 2013 -
Though educated as a painter, fifty-three-year-old Lee MacPhearson has lived her life coloring inside of the lines. The quintessential working mother of four, Lee has been the proper faculty wife—an ill-fitting role at best—while somehow managing to nurture her passion project, Mad Dog Gallery, into one of the Pacific Northwest’s most notable galleries. The casualty in all of this has been Lee’s marriage—and her sense of self. Having just delivered her last child to college, Lee is overwhelmed by her empty nest, and she’s left wondering what happened to the woman she once was. Ultimately, however, Barb Yakamura, Lee’s best friend and the brilliant and irreverent Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is the one who truly overflows with ideas about what Lee should do—including one that leads Lee, Brian, and the entire MacPhearson family to an ending they never expected. Author: Tracey Barnes Priestley Publication Date: May 14, 2013 -
“Fire & Water is simply a wonderful read. From the very first page, story and characters urge the reader forward. Yet even as the plot rises and tangles, vital issues are examined: Can a surgeon, who thinks she can fix anything, fix a broken heart? A broken mind? Art, like life, is transient. With a discerning eye for detail, and some truly beautiful love scenes, Fasbinder takes the reader on a most compelling and satisfying ride, all the way to the final four words.” —Sands Hall, author of Catching Heaven and Tools of the Writer’s Craft Only in the glaring light of hindsight does aspiring surgeon Kate Murphy understand that she was groomed for the path she’s taken. Raised by a widowed dad and a misshapen, sometimes comical trio of parental surrogates from Murphy’s Pub, her father’s Irish bar in San Francisco, Kate has never understood how protected she is—but when she learns that her well-meaning family has hidden bitter truths about her mother’s mental illness and death, the rest of her family history unravels. Author: Betsy Graziani Fasbinder Publication Date: February 14, 2013 -
London Book Festival: First Place Autobiography, December 2013 Independent Publishers: Bronze Award, May 2013 New York Book Festival: Honorable Mention, June 2014 Tasting Home is the history of a woman’s emotional education, the romantic tale of a marriage between a straight woman and a gay man, and an exploration of the ways that cooking can lay the groundwork for personal healing, intimate relation, and political community. Organized by decade and by the cookbooks that shaped author Judith Newton’s life, Tasting Home takes readers on an extraordinary journey through the cuisines, cultural spirit, and politics of the 1940s through 2011, complete with recipes. Author: Judith Newton Publication Date: March 1, 2013
