'It's Christmas in a book!' Katie Fforde 'Sprinkled with Christmas magic!' Milly Johnson 'A scrumptious seasonal treat!' Heidi Swain ------------------------------ Residential-home caterer Connie has had one online-dating disaster too many. Hurt in the past and with her son to consider, now she's feeling hesitant. Then one of Connie's residents sets her up on a date at a beautiful German Christmas market - with the promise she'll take a mini-bus full of pensioners along with her... Amongst the twinkling lights and smell of warm gingerbread in the old market square, Connie heads off on her date with a checklist of potential partner must-haves. Baker Henrich ticks all the boxes, but when Connie meets Henrich's rival William, she starts to wonder if ticking boxes is the answer. Will Connie's wish for love this Christmas come true, and if so - with who? ------------------------------- Readers are feeling enchanted by Finding Love at the Christmas Market: 'This book was a hot chocolate on a cold day, warming and satisfying.' 'I could smell the gingerbread and spices, a real hug of a book.' 'A beautiful book about finding what matters most at Christmas . . . such a heart-warming story.' If you loved Finding Love at the Christmas Market, pre-order Jo's newest Christmas novel, Countdown to Christmas, now!

The marketplace is commonly described as brutish, greed-based, cutthroat, or unrelentingly exploitative. The Market Loves You – Jeffrey Tucker’s latest collection of evocative observations of everyday products, services, and life in the market – rejects this characterization. He argues that benevolence characterizes trading relationships, entrepreneurship, work contracts, and the effects of decisions by market players. These are a civilizing, evenly lovely, institutions that embed complex human relationships that extend all over the world, involving potentially billions of people. Every unforced decision to trade represents a spark of insight, a hope for a better future, and the instantiation of a human relationship that affirms the dignity of everyone involved, he writes. Sometimes that relationship is personal; it is even more awesome to consider the enormously complex impersonal relationships that make up the vast global networks of exchange that make our lives wonderful. We take the results for granted because they are so much part of our daily experience. If they suddenly went missing, any aspect of what we depend on to live a better life, we would experience demoralization and even devastation. The lights go out. The gas stations close. The shelves are empty. The doctors run out of medicine. There is no one to fix the plumbing, no one to repair the heater, no one to do the surgery on my heart. This is a world that is less lovely than the world of plenty we’ve come to expect. The institutional setting in which human relationships become real in our lives is the market. This does not entail reducing human life to dollars and cents. It is about the recognition that our value as human beings is bound up with our associations with others, our trading relationships, and the opportunities we have to value and be valued by others. Looked at this way, the moral aesthetic of the market is lovely. It fosters love. It needs love. “Economics, love, and life – these are all the same topic in the creative intelligence of Jeffrey Tucker. His writing sweeps you into a world of beautiful stories about the material world, infused with his gift for seeing the underlying human element in every exchange (as well as the brutality of the political means of social control). His new hymn to market forces brings what economics too often lacks, a vivid celebration of life and love as real human beings experience it. To see the world as Tucker does is a gift that few writers in economics have ever possessed.” ~ Helio Beltrão, President, Mises Institute Brazil "If you want to understand the plain sense of real economics, as against the fairy tales of fake economics, Tucker is your main man. In scores of charming little essays, free of pomp or pretense, he brings you to understand how a free people can live without coercion. He's a liberal 2.0, a sweet egalitarian, a generous, open-hearted spirit, yet realistic and tough-minded, too." ~ Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago “Jeffrey Tucker is always a delight to read because he understands and appreciates the market’s invisible heart as well as its invisible hand.” ~ Art Carden, Samford University “Jeffrey Tucker writes with a rare mix of economic understanding, historical awareness, philosophical depth, and unaffected humanity. And oh, also on display in these pages is a fearlessness in going to wherever the logic of his reasoning brings him. I learned something important from each of the 91 essays collected here.” ~ Donald Boudreaux, George Mason University The American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was founded in 1933 as the first independent voice for sound economics in the United States. Today it publishes ongoing research, hosts educational programs, publishes books, sponsors interns and scholars, and is home to the world-renowned Bastiat Society and the highly respected Sound Money Project. The American Institute for Economic Research is a 501c3 public charity.

As women moved into the formal labor force in large numbers over the last forty years, care work – traditionally provided primarily by women – has increasingly shifted from the family arena to the market. Child care, elder care, care for the disabled, and home care now account for a growing segment of low-wage work in the United States, and demand for such work will only increase as the baby boom generation ages. But the expanding market provision of care has created new economic anxieties and raised pointed questions: Why do women continue to do most care work, both paid and unpaid? Why does care work remain low paid when the quality of care is so highly valued? How effective and equitable are public policies toward dependents in the United States? In For Love and Money, an interdisciplinary team of experts explores the theoretical dilemmas of care provision and provides an unprecedented empirical overview of the looming problems for the care sector in the United States. Drawing on diverse disciplines and areas of expertise, For Love and Money develops an innovative framework to analyze existing care policies and suggest potential directions for care policy and future research. Contributors Paula England, Nancy Folbre, and Carrie Leana explore the range of motivations for caregiving, such as familial responsibility or limited job prospects, and why both love and money can be efficient motivators. They also examine why women tend to specialize in the provision of care, citing factors like job discrimination, social pressure, or the personal motivation to provide care reported by many women. Suzanne Bianchi, Nancy Folbre, and Douglas Wolf estimate how much unpaid care is being provided in the United States and show that low-income families rely more on unpaid family members for their child and for elder care than do affluent families. With low wages and little savings, these families often find it difficult to provide care and earn enough money to stay afloat. Candace Howes, Carrie Leana and Kristin Smith investigate the dynamics within the paid care sector and find problematic wages and working conditions, including high turnover, inadequate training and a “pay penalty” for workers who enter care jobs. These conditions have consequences: poor job quality in child care and adult care also leads to poor care quality. In their chapters, Janet Gornick, Candace Howes and Laura Braslow provide a systematic inventory of public policies that directly shape the provision of care for children or for adults who need personal assistance, such as family leave, child care tax credits and Medicaid-funded long-term care. They conclude that income and variations in states’ policies are the greatest factors determining how well, and for whom, the current system works. Despite the demand for care work, very little public policy attention has been devoted to it. Only three states, for example, have enacted paid family leave programs. Paid or unpaid, care costs those who provide it. At the heart of For Love and Money is the understanding that the quality of care work in the United States matters not only for those who receive care but also for society at large, which benefits from the nurturance and maintenance of human capabilities. As care work gravitates from the family to the formal economy, this volume clarifies the pressing need for America to fundamentally rethink its care policies and increase public investment in this increasingly crucial sector.

A wise and humorous memoir about a young economist trying to apply the rules of the market to his own floundering love life. A wise and humorous memoir about a young economist trying to apply the rules of the market to his own floundering dating life. "I know that this sounds like a bit of a clich , but really, it's not you..." The woman who said this to William Nicolson was funny, talented and unbearably beautiful. His mother said he ought to marry that girl. And he lost her in a personal best time of six weeks. It was when he found himself being dumped like this yet again that he decided something had to be done. William is an economist, which means he's good at reducing an infinitely complex world into a set of clear, rational principles about the way people and markets behave. Unfortunately, he has never been able to replicate this in the world of romance. Girls confuse him; they're the very definition of infinite complexity. In this book, he sets out to apply the rules of economics to his shaky love life. For a time, everything seems to be clearer. Want to play hard to get? Reduce your supply. Want a girlfriend? Find an undervalued asset. Why are all the good ones taken? That'll be the Efficient Market Hypothesis. But things don't work out quite as he'd hoped, and he's more isolated than ever. Can he find the perfect economic theory to rescue him from a future of lonely nights, or is the dating game too intricate to be won by logical, rational thinking?

Conquering the dating market—from an economist’s point of view After more than twenty years, economist Paul Oyer found himself back on the dating scene—but what a difference a few years made. Dating was now dominated by sites like Match.com, eHarmony, and OkCupid. But Oyer had a secret weapon: economics. It turns out that dating sites are no different than the markets Oyer had spent a lifetime studying. Monster.com, eBay, and other sites where individuals come together to find a match gave Oyer startling insight into the modern dating scene. The arcane language of economics—search, signaling, adverse selection, cheap talk, statistical discrimination, thick markets, and network externalities—provides a useful guide to finding a mate. Using the ideas that are central to how markets and economics and dating work, Oyer shows how you can apply these ideas to take advantage of the economics in everyday life, all around you, all the time. For all online daters—and for anyone else swimming in the vast sea of the information economy—this book uses Oyer’s own experiences, and those of millions of others, to help you navigate the key economic concepts that drive the modern age.

A hilarious view of life after divorce; you’ll never look at properties again without thinking of your dating life. Back on the Market is a Realtor’s guide to life, love, and dating and the multitude of challenges that come with it all. Holly Parker has sold 8 billion dollars of luxury real estate throughout her career as one of Manhattan’s most successful brokers. Through her humor and quick wit, she connects common real estate terms to everyday life, making Back on the Market a fun and unforgettable read. After seven years of marriage, Holly found herself “falling out of contract,” as a newly divorced woman reluctantly facing the prospect of being “back on the market.” She understands that life is transactional, whether it’s a business decision or those we spend our time with, so she took her skills as a master real estate agent and applied everything she knew to getting her life back. Cleverly told through the eyes of a Realtor, Holly depicts the perils of life, love, and dating—whether it’s dealing with first-time buyers (those who have a romanticized version of what they think they want and what they can actually have), the value of curb appeal, fixing the foundation of a damaged home, not listing before you’re ready to sell, staging, and so much more. Hilarious and emotional, Holly shares her dating experiences with “fixer uppers,” the guys with “good bones,” and the “forever renters.” Back on the Market is a story of hope and the pursuit of happiness. Full of memorable takeaways, lessons, and anecdotes, Holly will help you find your perfect “home” and fall in love with life all over again.

It's been three years since his fianc e's mysterious suicide, and Jace Montgomery still hungers for answers. Stacy was kind, funny, and in love -- why, on a trip to England, would she end her life in a room above a village pub? Then Jace stumbles upon a photo of a rambling estate tucked inside one of Stacy's books -- and a cryptic note dated one day before her death: "Ours again. Together forever. See you there...." Drawing on his family's vast wealth, Jace returns to England to purchase the unsightly Priory House -- and soon discovers it is haunted by the headstrong ghost of Ann Stuart. Unraveling the ties between past and present with the help of a beautiful local journalist, Jace must at last reconcile his heartwrenching loss and his own hopeful future.