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Kavita Basi had a wonderful life―a job she enjoyed, a wonderful family, and seemingly perfect health. Then an unexpected event took place and turned her entire world upside down. In Room 23, Basi chronicles her time suffering from a subarachnoid hemorrhage―bleeding in the area of the skull surrounding the brain. With this diagnosis, Basi went from being healthy and happy to battling a condition with a 50 percent mortality rate. Following her challenging journey through near death and recovery, this memoir takes an exciting, interactive approach, using QR codes within the chapters so readers can transport themselves to the timeline of what Basi was doing at each moment of her experience, either linking to an Instagram post or video blog―bringing her struggles, and ultimate triumph, alive. Author: Kavita Basi Publication Date: November 6, 2018 -
In the summer of 1979, Diane Meyer Lowman, a nineteen-year-old Middlebury College student, embarked on a ten-week working trip aboard a German container ship with a mostly male crew. The journey would take her from New York to Australia and New Zealand and back, through the lush Panama Canal, to a Koala sanctuary and a Maori Museum. She swabbed decks and mended linens, navigated not only the Panama Canal, but perhaps more harrowingly the awkward and sometimes threatening mostly male shipboard society and its politics. The voyage would forever change her perspective on the world and her place in it. She left the port of New York a subservient, malleable girl and sailed back past the Statue of Liberty on her return as a more confident, independent, resilient young woman who’d learned to stand on her own two feet even if the roughest of waters. Author: Diane Meyer Lowman Publication Date: November 13, 2018 -
"Maureen reminds us to pay attention and follow the signs and signals of the Universe that lead us to the life of our dreams. To remember, even in the midst of the depths of despair, that endings are always beginnings, that we are writing our own stories in collaboration with the Divine Creator that lives within us, to never give up when the chips are down, because the Goddess will burn down our limited expectations and deliver something bigger, badder, and bolder than we could ever dream of ourselves." —Cathy Richardson, lead singer Jefferson Starship This story begins with an ending: the day Maureen Muldoon realized the devastating fact that her husband was having an affair—and leaving her for Miss Universe. Miss freaking Universe! How does this even happen? An intimate examination of Muldoon’s unraveling in the face of this betrayal, A Spiritual Vixen’s Guide to An Unapologetic Life takes a fresh, funny and fearless look at loss, denial, anger, grace, and liberation. Muldoon reveals the strength that comes from facing one’s fears, the humor that arrives in the darkest hours, and the miracles that happen when you least expect them in this grand tapestry of tales from the dark side. Ultimately, with wit and wisdom, she walks herself out of hell in a pair of sexy stilettos and manages to do what the all the king’s horse and all the king’s men could not: she puts herself back together. And in doing so, she comes to find more beauty and strength in the fractured places than anyone would have ever imagined. Author: Maureen Muldoon Publication Date: November 20, 2018 -
Chile—named the Lonely Planet 2017 destination of the year—has been Suzanne Adam’s home for over four decades. She knows the territory—its culture, its idiosyncrasies, and its exotic landscapes, from Patagonian glaciers to the northern Atacama Desert. In this heartfelt collection of sixty-three personal essays, she searches for universal truths and sparks of beauty revealed in small, daily moments both in her native land—the United States—and in Chile. She considers how her American past and move to Chile have shaped her life and enriched her worldview, and she explores with insight questions on aging, women’s roles, spiritual life, friendship, love, and writers who inspire. In a return trip to Colombia fifty years after her two-year stay there as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Adam reflects on the mark left on her by that experience. Finally, she crosses America from east to west, immersing herself in regional cultures and discovering a common thread of reciprocity throughout. Author: Suzanne Adam Publication Date: November 20, 2018 -
Anita Swanson Speake’s story begins with a diagnosis: idiopathic cardiomyopathy. At sixty-five, she had just found out that her heart was dying. When she got the news, she was in her late sixties. Her girls were raised and gone. Her three decades of high-stress nursing was behind her. She was living with her hopefully last, and certainly best, husband in a big, contemporary house with lots of glass on a lake in rural Northern California. She loved her life. But she didn’t love her scary new medical condition—or the many awful side effects of the medications her doctor promised would serve as a crutch for her heart. As she struggled with all this, Speake began to see herself as a member of the dying rather than the living. And over time, she began to ponder a new question: “Do I really want to get well?” Heartsong takes readers on an often humorous, sometimes sad journey through the best of Western medicine, complemented by a sampling of alternative and Eastern support systems—and through Speake’s evolving relationship with God—as she navigates this transition. Ultimately, with the help of her doctors, a Reiki practitioner, a Mindfulness coach, and her deep, abiding faith, Speake found renewed purpose late in a changing life—and realized God was waiting there for her all along. Author: Anita Swanson Speake Publication Date: May 14, 2019 -
Irene Sardanis was born into a Greek family in the Bronx in the 1940s in which fear and peril hovered. Her mother had come to New York for an arranged marriage. Her father drank, gambled, and enjoyed other women—and then, when Irene was eleven, abandoned her family altogether. Faced with their mother’s violent outbursts in the wake of this betrayal, Irene’s older siblings found a way out, but Irene was trapped, hostage to her mother’s rage and despair. When she finally escaped her mother as a young adult, she married a neighbor, also Greek, who controlled and dominated her just like her mother always had. But Irene wasn’t ready to let her story end there. With therapy, she eventually found the courage to leave her husband and pursue her own dreams. Out of the Bronx is her story of coming to terms with the mother and past that terrified and paralyzed her for far too long—and of how she went on to create a new life free of those fears. Author: Irene Sardanis Publication Date: May 14, 2019 -
In the summer of 1994, a freak lightning and thunder storm explodes on the southern coast of Maine, killing Nancy Bills’s husband and critically wounding her younger son. She promises her late husband that she will write their family’s story and bind it with a red ribbon of love and courage. In language alternately tender and gritty, The Red Ribbon documents the aftermath of Bills’s husband’s death. As a wife, she grieves and attempts to rebuild her life; as a mother, she strains to be the parent her young adult sons need. Then, one year later, she is faced with more loss—this time, the father whom she adores. After his death, other deaths, some anticipated and others unpredictable, follow. Meanwhile, the impending death of her aging mother is a particular challenge; Nancy struggles to be a good daughter, and on many visits to Montana, her home state, she tries to mend their painful history. Insightful, moving, and full of intelligence and humanity, The Red Ribbon is a story of surviving the many and often devastating lightning strikes of life, and a gift of compassion and wisdom for readers who are struggling with their own losses. Author: Nancy Freund Bills Publication Date: May 28, 2019 -
After growing up in abject poverty in a dysfunctional alcoholic environment and being terrorized by a boarder who lived in the root cellar, Athena Demetrios repressed her traumatic memories—thrusting her into a downward spiral of melancholy and despair. But when, as an adult, she had a powerful spiritual experience that opened doors into other dimensions, she began an odyssey in which truth became stranger than fiction—a journey through hypnotic regression that led her to transcendence and healing. Demetrios’s story of courage, mystical insight, and otherworldly guidance will open your heart and challenge your perception of the borders of our minds and the boundaries of our world. This is a tale of past-life visions, spiritual guides, and communication beyond death—and emergence into the radiant light of self-discovery, knowing, and being at peace with all that is. Author: Athena Demetrios Publication Date: April 30, 2019 -
Dena was a busy midwife trapped on the hamster wheel of working motherhood. Adam was an eccentric Buddhist yogi passing as a hard-working dad. Bella was fourteen and wanted to be normal. Sophia was up for anything that involved skipping school. Together, they shouldered backpacks, walked away from their California life of all-night births, carpool schedules, and Cal Skate, and criss-crossed India and Nepal for eight months—a journey that led them to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the tree where the Buddha sat, and the arms of Amma the Divine Mother. From the banks of the Ganges to the Himalayan roof of the world, this enthralling memoir is an unforgettable odyssey, a moving meditation on modern family life, and a spiritual quest, written with humor and honesty—and filled with love and awe. Author: Dena Moes Publication Date: April 2, 2019 -
Barbara Hoffbeck never quite felt she fit into the small farming community of Big Stone City, South Dakota—and as the youngest of seven growing up during the post-Depression era, she struggled to find her place within her large Catholic family. Barbara defied expectations at every turn, determined to prove her worth in a male-dominated time and place, whether it be by joining a "no girls allowed" hunting trip with her brothers, racing to help save her family's burning barn, or moving across the United States to New York City to pursue a career in publishing. Barbara took her experiences in stride, grounding herself in the beauty of her surroundings—an appreciation stemming from her Dakota roots. Lost Without the River is the story of a girl who grows up, leaves home, and eventually discovers an appreciation for the farm she left behind. It demonstrates the emotional power that even the smallest place can exert, and the gravitational pull that calls a person back home. Author: Barbara Scoblic Publication Date: April 16, 2019 -
“Devilishly sharp… a masterful balance of psychological excavation and sumptuous description.” —Kirkus Reviews An only child, Deborah Burns grew up in prim 1950s America in the shadow of her beautiful, unconventional, rule-breaking mother, Dorothy—a red-haired beauty who looked like Rita Hayworth and skirted norms with a style and flare that made her the darling of men and women alike. Married to the son of a renowned Italian family with ties to the underworld, Dorothy fervently eschewed motherhood and domesticity, turning Deborah over to her spinster aunts to raise while she was the star of a vibrant social life. As a child, Deborah revered her charismatic mother, but Dorothy was a woman full of secrets with a troubled past—a mistress of illusion whose love seemed just out of her daughter’s grasp. In vivid, lyrical prose, Saturday’s Child tells the story of Deborah’s eccentric upbringing and her quest in midlife, long after her parents’ death, to uncover the truth about her mother and their complex relationship. No longer under the spell of her maternal goddess, but still caught in a wrenching cycle of love and longing, Deborah must finally confront the reality of her mother’s legacy—and finally claim her own. Author: Deborah Burns Publication Date: April 9, 2019 -
Jane Pollak spent most of her life “looking for a family.” Raised by a mother who was emotionally unavailable, she grew up believing that love came from performance rather than from being seen, heard, and acknowledged for her true self. It followed that she married an extrovert who performed for his students and yet was unable to connect with his wife. In this poignant, instructive memoir, Pollak investigates the roots of misguided love and paints a picture of what it means to live a satisfied life. Her tale starts in the couples’ counseling office, where her soon-to-be ex-husband drops the bomb that he’s seeing someone else. From there, Jane goes on to find self-empowerment through her La Leche League group, her career as an artist, her travels around the world, her journey through twelve-step recovery, and her experiences while dating in her sixties. At last, she forges a blissful life on her own in Manhattan, conducting business and enjoying time with a committed partner. Inspiring and deeply relatable, Too Much of Not Enough Lessons I Learned to Become Myself is a primer on how to be the proactive agent of one’s own best path. Author: Jane Pollak Publication Date: April 30, 2019 -
The Parrot’s Perch opens in 2013, when Karen Keilt, age sixty, receives an invitation to testify at the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN in New York. The email sparks memories of her “previous life”—the one she has kept safely bottled up for more than thirty-seven years. Hopeful of helping to raise awareness about ongoing human rights violations in Brazil, she wants to testify, but she anguishes over reliving the horrific events of her youth. In the pages that follow, Keilt tells the story of her life in Brazil—from her exclusive, upper-class lifestyle and dreams of Olympic medals to her turmoil-filled youth. Full of hints of a dark oligarchy in Brazil, corruption, crime, and military interference, The Parrot’s Perch is a searing, sometimes shocking true tale of suffering, struggle—and survival. Karen Keilt lived through the darkest days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In her courageous and compelling memoir, Keilt narrates an emotionally honest reckoning of her desire to find true happiness. Forbidden by her wealthy family to even mention her imprisonment, torture, and rape, Keilt is forced to make a change that will affect the rest of her life. Seen through her testimony to the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN, readers become witnesses to both her vulnerability and her quiet strength. Author: Karen Keilt Publication Date: April 16, 2019 -
Jo’s mother, Babe, liked to drink, dance, and stay up very late. When the husband she adored went on sales calls, she waited for him in the parking lot, embroidering pillowcases. Jo grew up thinking that the last thing she wanted was to be like her mother. Then it dawned on her that her own happiness was derived in large part from lessons Babe had taught her. Her mother might have had tomato aspic and stewed rhubarb in her fridge, while Jo had organic kale and almond milk in hers, but in more important ways they were much closer in spirit than Jo had once thought. At a turbulent time in America, Never Sit If You Can Dance offers uplifting lessons in old-fashioned civility that will ring true with mothers, daughters, and their families. Told with lighthearted good humor, it’s a charming tale of the way things used to be—and probably still should be. Author: Jo Giese Publication Date: April 23, 2019 -
One terrible night in 2011, Brin Miller’s life is upended when she learns that her teenage stepson has been sexually abusing her two daughters. Once this secret is discovered, Brin’s marriage, already crumbling and unable to sustain itself, breaks apart. But against all odds, Brin and her husband, along with their daughters, are gradually able to learn resilience, forgiveness, strength, and courage, and—miraculously—Brin’s marriage begins to heal. Haunting and horrible yet hopeful and beautiful, Buried Saints is a fast and raw memoir of forgiveness and resilience, a revelatory look into a family deeply destroyed by deceit, and a truly astonishing story about the intense, unpredictable love of two parents who have to decide whether to fall or flourish in a tragic situation. Author: Brin Miller Publication Date: April 16, 2019 -
When they were young, Susan and Edna, children of Holocaust refugee parents, were inseparable; Edna was Susan’s first love and constant companion. But as they grew up and Edna’s physical, and mental challenges altered the ways she could develop, a gulf formed between them. Susan’s life became even more complicated when, just short of her sixteenth birthday, she learned that she’d been born without a uterus and would never menstruate or give birth to children. As she coped with this trauma, Edna continued loving her unconditionally, as she always had. In her adult years Edna lived a life of dignity in a spiritual community, becoming a model for how Susan could live hers. In her forties, Susan realized her dream of motherhood when she adopted a daughter. Throughout, Edna remained a teacher and loving presence in her sister’s life. Encompassing Susan and Edna’s lifelong, complex, intertwining relationship, Edna’s Gift has a powerful message: life may be unpredictable, even traumatic—but if you remain open, strength and wisdom will come to you from surprising and unexpected sources. Publication Date: June 4, 2019 Author: Susan Rudnick -
Part culinary memoir and part travelogue, Carole Bumpus gathered this compilation of intimate interviews, conversations, stories, and traditional family recipes (cuisine pauvre) in the kitchens of French families as she traveled throughout the countryside. Travel with her through Champagne caves/wineries and historic cathedrals, local farmers’ markets, ancient potters’ guilds, and restaurant kitchens with wood-fire ovens. Learn how to make homemade Spinach-stuffed Tortellini with Bolognaise Sauce from the Champagne region, Crêpes and Watercress-stuffed Ravioli from the Lorraine, and Baekeofe and Kugelhopf from the Alsace. “Go blind” from the family stock of Eau de Vie liqueur and be treated to tales of foraging for snails for the infamous and now extinct Escargots Festival. And, on a somber note, listen to accounts of families forced from their communities during the German occupation of WWII in the Alsace and Lorraine, only to continue to struggle for survival after finally making their way home. This book is a compilation of stories about making ends meet; about people being grateful for all they had, even when they had almost nothing; about the sharing of family jokes and laughter; and about family trials and triumphs. This book is about people savoring the life they have been given. Author: Carole Bumpus Publication Date: July 23, 2019 -
At eighteen, Paula is already a seasoned traveler, having begun life in England, crisscrossed the US as a young child, and survived a year in a London boarding school, immersed in her mother’s heritage. But when, at eighteen, she leaves home for Israel to explore her father’s Jewish roots and learn Hebrew on a kibbutz ulpan (a work/study program on a collective farm), her quest will change her life forever. Seduced by her love of language, she continues the journey to France for several years before returning at last to settle to Israel. As she navigates her odyssey from vision to reality, she will learn much more than two new languages—and realize that if she is ever to forge her own identity, she must also separate from her twin sister and follow her own path. Author: Paula Wagner Publication Date: July 30, 2019 -
At the age of forty-five, Deborah Tobola returns to her birthplace, San Luis Obispo, to work in the very prison her father worked in when he was a student at Cal Poly. But she’s not wearing a uniform as he did; she’s there to teach creative writing and manage the prison’s arts program—a dream job. As she creates a theatre program for prisoners, Tobola finds plenty of drama off the stage as well. Inside the razor wire she finds a world frozen in the ’50s, with no contact with the outside except by telephone; officers who think prisoners don’t deserve programs; bureaucrats who want to cut arts funding; and inmates who steal, or worse. But she loves engaging prisoners in the arts and helping them discover their voices: men like Opie, the gentleman robber; Razor, the roughneck who subscribes to The New Yorker; charismatic Green Eyes, who really has blue eyes; Doo Wop, a singer known for the desserts he creates from prison fare. Alternating between tales of creating drama in prison and Tobola’s own story, Hummingbird in Underworld takes readers on an unforgettable literary journey—one that is frank, funny, and fascinating. Author: Deborah Tobola Publication Date: July 23, 2019 -
In September 2007, Christine Ristaino was attacked in a store parking lot while her three- and five-year-old children watched. In All the Silent Spaces, Ristaino shares what it felt like to be an ordinary person confronted with an extraordinary event—a woman trying to deal with acute trauma even as she went on with her everyday life, working at a university and parenting two children with her husband. She not only narrates how this event changed her but also tells how looking at the event through both the reactions of her community and her own sensibility allowed her to finally face two other violent episodes she had previously experienced. As new memories surfaced after the attack, it took everything in Ristaino’s power to not let catastrophe unravel the precarious threads holding everything together. Moving between the greater issues associated with violence and the personal voyage of overcoming grief, All the Silent Spaces is about letting go of what you think you know in order to rebuild. Author: Christine Ristaino Publication Date: July 9, 2019 -
Yamini Redewill is an Uber driver in San Francisco—one of a growing number of rideshare drivers around the world. What makes her unique is that she’s a seventy-nine-year-old single woman who views her Uber driving as a form of spiritual practice! The Joy of Uber Driving chronicles the unexpected corkscrew twists and turns Redewill encounters on the road to love and happiness. How could she know that all those fabulous dreams she cherished as a younger woman were just illusions on the way to reality and would vanish like dust in the wind? But ultimately, her wild ride through life—which includes obsessive love on Catalina; sex, drugs, and alcohol in Hollywood; eleven years of celibacy in Buddhism, and Tantric sex and spirituality in India—helps her wend her way to her authentic self and to creative fulfillment in the winter of her life. In The Joy of Uber Driving, Redewill shares the wisdom that comes from living a full life of heart-centered passion, as well as the self-awareness that has allowed her to be the happy, confident, creative, and young “old broad” she now finds herself to be. Author: Yamini Redewill Publication Date: June 25, 2019 -
Through eight humorous essays, Keturah Kendrick chronicles her journey to freedom. She shares the stories of other women who have freed themselves from the narrow definition of what makes a “proper woman.” Spotlighting the cultural bullying that dictates women must become mothers to the expectation that one’s spiritual path follow the traditions of previous generations, Kendrick imagines a world where black women make life choices that center on their needs and desires. She also examines the rising trend of women choosing to remain single and explores how such a choice is the antithesis to the trope of the sorrowful black woman who cannot find a man to grant her the prize of legal partnership. A mixture of memoir and cultural critique, No Thanks uses wit and insight to paint a picture of the twenty-first-century black woman who has unchained herself from what she is supposed to be. A black woman who has given herself permission to be whomever she wants to be. Author: Keturah Kendrick Publication Date: June 18, 2019 -
The secrets, lies, and layers of deception about Diane Dewey’s origins were meant for her protection—but eventually, they imploded. Living with her family in suburban Philadelphia, Diane had grown up knowing she was born in Stuttgart and adopted at age one from an orphanage. She’d been told her biological parents were dead. Then, in 2002, when she was forty-seven years old, Diane got a letter from Switzerland: her biological father, Otto, wanted to bring her into his life. With that, her world shifted on its axis. In the months that ensued, everybody had a different story to tell about Diane’s origins, including Otto when they met in New York City. She struggled to understand what was at stake with the lies. Like a private eye, she sifted through competing versions of the truth only to find that, having traveled throughout Europe and back, identity is a state of mind. As more information surfaced, the myths gave way to a certain elusive peace; Diane discovered a tribe in her mother’s family, found a Swiss husband, gained a voice, and, for the first time, began to trust in the intuition that had nudged her all along. One-part forensic investigation, one-part self-discovery, Fixing the Fates is a story about seeing behind artifice and living one’s truth. Author: Diane Dewey Publication Date: June 4, 2019 -
In this richly depicted story, told in vignettes relative to markers of age and experience, Patricia Eagle reveals the heartbreak and destruction of her sexual abuse, from age four to thirteen, by her father. A victim of her father’s anger and her mother’s complacency with his abusive behavior, Eagle uses dissociation and numbing in response to the abuse, and as a way to block her own sense of self. How does a child confused by episodes of abuse come to know what is safe or unsafe, right or wrong, normal or abnormal? How does a young woman learn the difference between real love and a desire for sexual pleasure stimulated by abusive childhood sexual experiences? Careening through life, Eagle wonders how to trust others and, most importantly, herself. As a mature woman struggling to understand and live with her past, she remains earnest in her pursuit of clarity, compassion, and trust to build a stronger life. Being Mean is about blocking sexual abuse memories, having them surface, then learning how to acknowledge and live with incomprehensible experiences in the healthiest ways possible. Author: Patricia Eagle Publication Date: June 11, 2019
