Multi-award-winning How Much Big Is the Sky is a mother's searingly melodic and eloquent love song to her teenage son, Ryan, following his sudden death resulting from a car crash. Sherry Chapman captures the intimacy and immediacy of her experience with a rare combination of profound tenderness, literary skill, and raw candor. This stunning account of love and loss is structured in five parts resembling the various stages of grief. From the sudden blow of an early morning phone call to a mother's frantic advocacy to her final reflections on what remains, this book is unforgettable. Literary Awards and Honors Include: * Gold medal winner, non-fiction, 2021 Kindle Book Awards * Gold medal winner, adult non-fiction, 2020 Wishing Shelf Book Awards * Winner, Outstanding Memoir category, 2020 IAN Book of the Year Awards * Winner, Memoir, 2020 NABE Pinnacle Book Achievement Award * Winner, Grief, 2020 National Indie Excellence Award * Winner, silver medal, non-fiction – Grief/Hardship, 2020 Readers' Favorite * Winner, second place, non-fiction, 2020 IAN Book of the Year Awards * Honoree, 2020, B.R.A.G. Medallion

2022 Readers' Favorite Gold Medal Winner in Non-Fiction - Memoir Genre Award-Winning Memoir “Courageously exploratory, making for a truly enlightening read." (Kirkus Reviews) Raising Jess is the powerful story of one family’s survival when faced with adversity. Written with compassion, honesty, and humor, it tells of a family changed forever by the birth of a child with a rare chromosome deletion and their courageous decision to choose hope. Facing the challenges of caring for her daughter, marriage struggles, and the question of having more children, Vickie Rubin gives a glimpse into the world of her family and transformation while Raising Jess. This beautiful, gripping memoir will delight and leave you wanting more. "This is an inspiring story of tragedy and triumph, brilliantly and powerfully told. I highly recommend it." - Ashley Adams, Author “This is a triumphant tale.” - Cathy Shields, Author" "A heartwarming, compassionate story. This story will bring tears to the eyes of readers as they are educated and enraptured by one family’s journey with a child with special needs.” (5-Star Review by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers' Favorite) “Couldn’t put it down! Raising Jess is an amazing book! Vickie Rubin’s writing is masterful! Highly recommend.” - Mike Steklof, Ed. D. “Beautiful Insightful Narrative That Resonates Deeply. I feel enlightened, inspired, hopeful and transformed by Vickie's story.” - Janet G. “Beautifully written and a must-read for anyone that knows someone with disabilities or wants to know a family’s perspective.” - Jill G. “I couldn’t put it down. Get a copy of this book—so pure, raw, and beautiful.” - Ashleigh Bussinger “Vickie reveals her Soul to the reader. A Must-Read for All” - Lori N. Vickie Schlanger Rubin, M.S Ed., three-time award-winning author, contributes essays to Newsweek, Buffalo News Opinion, and blogs worldwide. Vickie is an experienced public speaker and passionate advocate for families of children with disabilities. Her blog, Vickie's Views (www.vickierubin.com), gives a heartwarming and humorous view of everyday life.

“A gripping and beautiful book about the power of love in the face of unimaginable loss.” --Cheryl Strayed For readers of The Bright Hour and When Breath Becomes Air, a moving, transcendent memoir of loss and a stunning exploration of marriage in the wake of unimaginable grief. As the book opens: two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious, and she is immediately rushed to the hospital. But although it begins with this event and with the anguish Jayson and his wife, Stacy, confront in the wake of their daughter's trauma and the hours leading up to her death, Once More We Saw Stars quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss. Jayson recognizes, even in the midst of his ordeal, that there will be a life for him beyond it--that if only he can continue moving forward, from one moment to the next, he will survive what seems unsurvivable. With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, he captures both the fragility of life and absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love. This is an unforgettable memoir of courage and transformation--and a book that will change the way you look at the world.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be. Praise for Son of a Gun “[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review “[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR “If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe “A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.”—Entertainment Weekly

WINNER NAUTILUS AWARD - SILVER MEDAL 2018 WINNER INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD - 2018 WINNER GOLD MEDAL - LITERARY TITAN AWARD - 2019 WINNER SILVER MEDAL - READERS FAVORITE, MEMOIR - 2019 FINALIST NEXT GEN BOOK AWARDS - 2018 BEST MEMOIR FINALIST SILVER FALCHION AWARD - 2019 FIVE STAR REVIEW FROM READERS' FAVORITE September 25, 2012 Ted Neill picked up a knife to cut his wrists open and kill himself. Post hospitalization and treatment for major depressive disorder, he wrote Two Years of Wonder, a memoir based on his journey towards recovery. In it, he examines the experience that left him with such despair: living and working for two years at an orphanage for children with HIV/AIDS in Nairobi, Kenya. Neill interweaves his story with the experiences of Oliver, Miriam, Ivy, Harmony, Tabitha, Sofie, Nea, and other children, exploring their own paths of trauma, survival, and resilience. In prose that is by turns poetic, confessional, and brutal, Neill with the children he comes alongside, strive to put the pieces of their fractured lives back together as they search for meaning and connection, each trying to reclaim their humanity and capacity to love in the face of inexplicable suffering and loss. Two Years of Wonder has been compared to Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love, and Brene Brown's Daring Greatly and Dare to Lead. Fan's of these authors, their vulnerability, their depth, and their focus on social issues will find that Neill's story and the story of the children he knew in Kenya,resonates.

Matt Logelin writes a courageous and searingly honest memoir about the first year of his life following the birth of his daughter and the death of his wife. Matt and Liz Logelin were high school sweethearts. After years of long-distance dating, the pair finally settled together in Los Angeles, and they had it all: a perfect marriage, a gorgeous new home, and a baby girl on the way. Liz's pregnancy was rocky, but they welcomed Madeline, beautiful and healthy, into the world. Just twenty-seven hours later, Liz suffered a pulmonary embolism and died instantly, without ever holding the daughter whose arrival she had so eagerly awaited. Though confronted with devastating grief and the responsibilities of a new and single father, Matt did not surrender to devastation; he chose to keep moving forward-to make a life for Maddy. In this memoir, Matt shares bittersweet and often humorous anecdotes of his courtship and marriage to Liz; of relying on his newborn daughter for the support that she unknowingly provided; and of the extraordinary online community of strangers who have become his friends. In honoring Liz's legacy, heartache has become solace.

A brave, intimate, beautifully crafted memoir by a survivor of the tsunami that struck the Sri Lankan coast in 2004 and took her entire family. On December 26, Boxing Day, Sonali Deraniyagala, her English husband, her parents, her two young sons, and a close friend were ending Christmas vacation at the seaside resort of Yala on the south coast of Sri Lanka when a wave suddenly overtook them. She was only to learn later that this was a tsunami that devastated coastlines through Southeast Asia. When the water began to encroach closer to their hotel, they began to run, but in an instant, water engulfed them, Sonali was separated from her family, and all was lost. Sonali Deraniyagala has written an extraordinarily honest, utterly engrossing account of the surreal tragedy of a devastating event that all at once ended her life as she knew it and her journey since in search of understanding and redemption. It is also a remarkable portrait of a young family's life and what came before, with all the small moments and larger dreams that suddenly and irrevocably ended.