The daughter of a colonel in the army of the Shah of Iran describes her privileged early childhood, her father's arrest and execution, and her mother's decision to divide the family until they could start a new life together in the United States.

Can we ever rediscover the lost pieces of ourselves that time and tragedy have stolen? Midcoast Maine, 1992. A fragile veil separates a seemingly idyllic small town from dark secrets lying just beneath. After his sister’s untimely death, life holds little meaning for teenaged CJ Slater. Numb, withdrawn, and plagued with self-doubt, CJ finds himself drawn into a dangerous mystery when he meets the enigmatic Izzy. Izzy believes the birthmark over her heart is a scar from when she was killed in a previous life. After a cataclysmically traumatic childhood, she ran away from home and dedicated herself to finding the person she believes to have brutally murdered her previous incarnation. While CJ does not believe in reincarnation, he believes in Izzy. Convinced she has tracked the killer to CJ’s town, the two slowly start to unravel the mystery and unwittingly unearth insidious and perilous secrets. At once a gripping mystery, a moving coming-of-age tale, and a philosophical examination of the human condition, Even After Always explores how we can recover what time takes away. It is an affirmation of the redemptive power of love and the belief in ourselves and each other.

A “special work” (J. S. Park) that honors life’s deep griefs, great joys, and unsettled in-betweens through every sacred season, assuring us that we are never alone “Oh, I love this book. . . . Honest and hopeful, masterfully written, both a balm and a bolstering.”—Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author Exquisitely told and urgently resonant, Even After Everything is a love letter to anyone who has opened their heart only to be hurt. Stephanie Duncan Smith proposes that it’s not through grit or forced resilience that you will find a way forward, but through receiving the full spectrum of our lives, just as we receive the empathy of God-with-us in every moment. Duncan Smith’s disorientation began when she lost her first pregnancy on the winter solstice, just as the world readied to celebrate its most historic birth on Christmas. Then a new yet uncertain pregnancy unfolded parallel to the pandemic, until nearly one year to the day of her loss, she gave birth to her daughter at the peak of mortality in their city. These contradictions compelled Duncan Smith into a desperate search for steadiness, which she found in the liturgical year as a grounding force and the promise that we are seen by God in every season. In Even After Everything, Duncan Smith traverses the church’s circle of time and reorients herself and us in the sacred story told through Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, and Ordinary Time. She reveals the sacred year—through its endless interplay of love, loss, risk, and resurrection—as a mirror to the human experience, an anchor for turbulent times, and a womb strong enough to encompass every human care. At its heart lives the promise of God-with-us, inviting us into the spiritual practice of taking courage in the trust that we are accompanied in everything, and love will always have the last word.

I was born in January the year of 1934 to Dave, Ethel "Ashby" Estep. The first of their children of four. My father was a coal miner and was killed in a cave in 1942. My mother remarried a few years later and had a total of nine children. My mother was a God loving woman and had a lot to do with the way I have lived my life and the man I am today. I have spent most of my working life as an Industrial Electrician but have done just about every kind of work that the hands can do. I have been blessed by God to have been what they call a handy man. I started writing songs when I was about 73 years old and they just keep on coming to me after I bought a guitar seems I would hear the strings saying the words of the song. I got my first guitar when I was about 14 years old but hadn't played for many years. I have been blessed by God all through my life with a family that I love with all my heart and they have loved me with so many grand children and now the family is growing with many great grand children I can hardly keep up with the number. It dose the heart good to hear the word Grandpa. So to everyone who may buy or read this song book love one another and this world will be a much better place and put your trust in God to make it that way. Thank you very much and God bless you all.

Growing up in conservative, postwar Australia isn't easy. For eight-year-old Sophie, who has just been told that she's a 'bastard', it seems that she lives in a world of secrets, unanswered questions and whispers. Who is her father and why did her mother never tell anyone who he was?With only her reclusive grandfather to raise her, and more than one neighbour expecting her to go off the rails like her mother - after all, apples rarely fall far from the tree - Sophie struggles to find her place in the world. In a time when experiences are shared around the kitchen table, over the back fence or up at the corner shop, Sophie learns that life is rarely simple, love is always complicated and sometimes it takes more than blood ties to make a family.

Pandora’s life changes when an inheritance forces her to confront her past. She is shocked to discover a daughter born in her teens and believed dead, is very much alive. Aided by her new love, the confronting Welsh psychiatrist Bryn Llewellyn, Pandora is consumed by her need to find the girl—only to be rejected. Tragedy reunites the pair in a painful and uneasy relationship… Contemporary Relationships Novel/Women’s Fiction by Janet Woods; originally published by Robert Hale [UK]

First student of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Sam Kashner tells with humor and grace his life with the Beats. But the best story is Kashner himself -- the coming-of-age of a young man in the chaotic world of the very idols he hoped to emulate. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.