In the third Pleasant Valley novel, the Amish community welcomes back one of their daughters, but she hasn’t returned alone... After spending three years in the English world, Anna Beiler has come back to Pleasant Valley with a baby girl, which will surely cause a stir since Anna is unmarried. She is also hiding secrets: the baby is not hers by birth, nor does she intend to stay. Rather, she desperately needs sanctuary from the child’s violent father... It surprises Anna how quickly her Amish habits return to her, and how satisfying it feels to reconnect with her friends and family. Even Anna’s childhood friend Samuel, whose slow, thoughtful manner used to frustrate her, becomes a fond and reassuring companion. But Anna hasn’t fully faced the consequences of her irresponsible youth, and now, her mere presence may endanger the family she holds dear. If she wants to stay, she must seek forgiveness from the community whose blessing she took for granted, and experience the true change of heart required to make a new beginning.

National Bestseller - REACHING BACK succeeds in creating lives that are memorable - they will draw you in and not let you go! This is a work that is both great literature & entertainment. An aging leather bound journal provides a glimpse into the captivating family history of Mignon Samuels, shedding light on the struggles of several generations of African-American women - reaching back in time to her maternal great grandmother to her own mother, and the circumstances endured by each woman in their lives. Fueled by their legacy, Mignon decides to make daring changes of her own, and forge ahead - out of her marriage - to a new future with her three daughters. Mignon feels betrayed by the dream of a fairytale tale life that everyone thought her wealthy husband had given to her - in truth, he had only given her pain. Author Nea Anna Simone crafts a multi-generational tale that takes the reader along a difficult journey with a woman who finds the courage and inspiration to break the bonds and strict codes of the African-American elite. Simone forces the reader to face questions of family secrets, difficult relationships and struggles of skin color. Does it still matter? Fast-paced and gripping, Reaching Back is for all people seeking the courage to face the future and unknown. Nea Anna Simone is a powerful literary voice!

It is 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keep loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over seventy years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold they key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.

While entertaining guests, Anna and Elsa decide to show them Elsa's ice palace, but the visitors are in for a surprise when Elsa's snowgies take over the place.

Julia Annas here offers a fundamental reexamination of Plato's ethical thought by investigating the Middle Platonist perspective, which emerged at the end of Plato's own school, the Academy. She highlights the differences between ancient and modern assumptions about Plato's ethics--and stresses the need to be more critical about our own. One of these modern assumptions is the notion that the dialogues record the development of Plato's thought. Annas shows how the Middle Platonists, by contrast, viewed the dialogues as multiple presentations of a single Platonic ethical philosophy, differing in form and purpose but ultimately coherent. They also read Plato's ethics as consistently defending the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and see it as converging in its main points with the ethics of the Stoics. Annas goes on to explore the Platonic idea that humankind's final end is "becoming like God"--an idea that is well known among the ancients but virtually ignored in modern interpretations. She also maintains that modern interpretations, beginning in the nineteenth century, have placed undue emphasis on the Republic, and have treated it too much as a political work, whereas the ancients rightly saw it as a continuation of Plato's ethical writings.

Russia, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the almost-living portrait that the Tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts she wrote just before her death, one of which opens a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairytale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapón, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa lifts the voices of coachmen, sailors, maids, and seamstresses in this playful, polyphonic, and subversive revision of the Russian revolution, told through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.

At age twenty, Saloma Miller left behind her Amish community in Burton, Ohio, and boarded a night train for Vermont, where she knew no one. In this poignant coming-of-age memoir, Saloma’s new life of freedom includes work as a waitress and plans to continue her education. Romance also blossoms with a Yankee toymaker. Soon, however, a vanload of people from her community, including the Amish bishop, arrive to take her back into the fold. Saloma’s freedom comes to an abrupt end when she goes back home to Ohio with them. Thus begins a years-long struggle of feeling torn between two worlds: will she remain Amish and embrace the sense of belonging and community her Amish life offers, or will she return to the newfound freedom she tasted in Vermont? Saloma settles into teaching in an Amish school and does her best to fit back into Amish ways, but a legacy of childhood abuse, struggles with an eating disorder, and questions of identity plague her. Her ties to the outside world remain, mostly through the quiet perseverance of the toymaker from Vermont. He keeps sending her cards, never giving up hope that their love could survive the strain of living in two different worlds. Bonnet Strings by Saloma Miller Furlong offers a universal story of overcoming adversity and a rare look inside an Amish community. Readers of Amish fiction and viewers of the PBS documentaries such as The Amish and The Amish: Shunned will find in it a true story: of woundedness and healing, of doubt and faith, and of the often competing desires for freedom and belonging.