Sometimes the sea won't let you go. And the best thing to do is stop fighting and give in. She never thought the island would be home again. But when Jenna returns to get her late mother's house ready to sell, her past and future intersect in ways she couldn't imagine. She's already dealing with her mother's death and her own recent divorce. The last thing she needs is to face off with her high school nemesis. But she can't seem to avoid Jackson Wells' smirking and frustratingly attractive face. She doesn't know why he's pulling the nice-guy act, but she isn't buying. Because if it isn't an act, Jenna might really be in trouble. Jackson has loved Jenna for half his life. Too bad she still sees him as the punk he was in high school. He just wants a chance to show her that he has changed. But every kindness he tosses her way, she lobs back like a grenade. Jackson can see how high she's built her walls to keep out the pain. Good thing he's prepared to scale them. No matter how long it takes. On a small beach island like Sandover, you can't ever escape your past. Can Jackson and Jenna forge a new future together?

Far off the coast of California looms a harsh rock known as the island of San Nicholas. Dolphins flash in the blue waters around it, sea otter play in the vast kep beds, and sea elephants loll on the stony beaches. Here, in the early 1800s, according to history, an Indian girl spent eighteen years alone, and this beautifully written novel is her story. It is a romantic adventure filled with drama and heartache, for not only was mere subsistence on so desolate a spot a near miracle, but Karana had to contend with the ferocious pack of wild dogs that had killed her younger brother, constantly guard against the Aleutian sea otter hunters, and maintain a precarious food supply. More than this, it is an adventure of the spirit that will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down. Karana's quiet courage, her Indian self-reliance and acceptance of fate, transform what to many would have been a devastating ordeal into an uplifting experience. From loneliness and terror come strength and serenity in this Newbery Medal-winning classic.

When Jenna returns home to Sandover Island after her mother's death, love is the last thing on her mind. The ink is barely dry on her divorce from her cheating husband and she simply wants to make plans for a new future. But she can't seem to avoid her past. Steve, her childhood sweetheart, shows up on her doorstep as though no time has passed. And she continually runs into Jackson, a man she wishes she never had to see again.Jackson is a changed man--if only he could get Jenna to see it. He is still nursing a crush, but she makes it abundantly clear that she still thinks of him as the bad boy he was in high school. Will Jackson be able to show her the man he has become and tell her how he feels? Or will Jenna fall right back into her old patterns with Steve?

The memoir, ISLAND BORN, challenges what is possible in love and nature. The author and his partner (and soon-to-be-wife), from vastly different backgrounds in Los Angeles, resolve to follow an intuition and sail "the wrong way around the world" - eastward across the Arabian Sea. Pitted against treacherous conditions that included the volatile social and political situation of the world ashore, they discover what it takes, and what it means, to surpass all previous personal and cultural expectations so that they might truly live, and in the end, truly die. Twenty-one years old, Gayle becomes pregnant in the middle of their sailing adventure, but her pregnancy does not make them retreat to Los Angeles where they began. They discover a tiny uninhabited island in a remote atoll, as barely discernible as a shake of pepper in the vast blue of their Indian Ocean chart. There they decide to give up their dream ship, and begin a real life journey neither of them could have ever imagined. With the help of an old chief on a nearby island, they build a thatched family home with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, no address, no bills, and no neighbors. ISLAND BORN seeks to answer the question of whether it is still possible to voyage to an unspoiled place, not only on the globe, but within ourselves. In meeting this risk head on, Frank and Gayle's voyage takes them to a reality of themselves that confirmed the bare whisper of that initial intuition. Together, they pull up anchor from the seabed of their culture and travel to a place where their determination, their romance, and their lives are challenged beyond the limits of each horizon, but they keep going.