NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY NPR “Amy Jo Burns writes a version of Appalachia that is one step removed from magic – all strychnine and moonshine and powerful wonder.”—NPR “[A] wrenching testament, told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal. . . This is not a despairing book, but a hopeful one, of Appalachian women taking back their life stories.” —New York Times Book Review On a lush mountaintop trapped in time, two women vow to protect each other at all costs-and one young girl must defy her father to survive. An hour from the closest West Virginia mining town, fifteen-year-old Wren Bird lives in a cloistered mountain cabin with her parents. They have no car, no mailbox, and no visitors-except for her mother's lifelong best friend. Every Sunday, Wren's father delivers winding sermons in an abandoned gas station, where he takes up serpents and praises the Lord for his blighted white eye, proof of his divinity and key to the hold he has over the community, over Wren and her mother. But over the course of one summer, a miracle performed by Wren's father quickly turns to tragedy. As the order of her world begins to shatter, Wren must uncover the truth of her father's mysterious legend and her mother's harrowing history and complex bond with her best friend. And with that newfound knowledge, Wren can imagine a different future for herself than she has been told to expect. Rich with epic love and epic loss, and diving deep into a world that is often forgotten but still part of America, Shiner reveals the hidden story behind two generations' worth of Appalachian heartbreak and resolve. Amy Jo Burns brings us a smoldering, taut debut novel about modern female myth-making in a land of men-and one young girl who must ultimately open her eyes.

The Star Shiner poses the question: Can a young man from a small rural Kentucky town--fleeing a domineering mother and an abusive, alcoholic father--find recognition and happiness in New York city, working with the high-powered fashion and cosmetic industries, and with some of the world's most famous people--without losing his values and his soul? After a notable career in fashion illustration and modeling in Paris, Richardson becomes a makeup artist, working with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and photographers Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Frecesco Scavullo. The book is more than a celebrity memoir in that it is particularly a narrative of the '70s into the '90s, a time in New York's history of financial difficulties and corruption. This was the golden era of fashion and cosmetics when Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, Charles Revson and Estee Lauder, the king and queen of cosmetics and Avedon, Penn and Scavullo ruled the industries. The reader is taken into wild nights at Studio 54 and into New York's downtown after-hours dungeons, seething with sex, drugs and danger, where individuals are treated as sexual stepping stones. Then the party ended with the scourge of AIDS that took Richardson's partner and turned Richardson's life around with a spiritual awakening.

Chief Reid Bennett and his “super-sleuth” dog tackle the crimes of Murphy’s Harbor in this “fairly sturdy, small-town tale, with quiet appeal” (Kirkus Reviews). In tiny Murphy’s Harbour, where Reid Bennett serves as the one‐man police force, questions and dead bodies tend to pile up all at once. The morning starts with Reid chasing off a gang of threatening teens with a baseball bat. Minutes later, Reid learns that a bank robber might be headed his way looking for vengeance. But the day does not really start rolling until Reid finds a dead woman in the trunk of a waterlogged car. What follows is a fast‐paced thriller involving rich lawyers, a questionable movie producer, and quite a few shifting identities. Everyone seems to be circling everyone else in a complicated orbit of sex and money. Can all these events be tied together?

In this book, originally published in 1980, John Argenti deliberately and systematically strips away the sophisticated methods for corporate planning to get down to a practical corporate planning process that works. This accessible book uses no jargon or maths, and will be of interest to students of management and business studies. It is also aimed at chief executives, managing directors and other very senior executives in companies and non-profit-making organisations.

Among the fishes. a remarkably wide range ofbiological adaptations to diverse habitats has evolved. As weIl as living in the conventional habitats of lakes. ponds. rivers. rock pools and the open sea. fish have solved the problems of life in deserts. in the deep sea. in the cold Antarctic. and in warm waters of high alkalinity or of low oxygen. Along with these adaptations. we find the most impressive specializations of morphology. physiology and behaviour. For example we can marvel at the high-speed swimming of the marlins. sailfish and warm-blooded tunas. air breathing in catfish and lungfish. parental care in the mouth-brooding cichlids and viviparity in many sharks and toothcarps. Moreover. fish are of considerable importance of the survival of the human species in the form ofnutritious and delicious food ofnumerous kinds. Rational exploitation and management of our global stocks of fishes must rely upon a detailed and precise insight of their biology. The Chapman and Hall Fish and Fisheries Series aims to present timely volumes reviewing important aspects of fish biology. Most volumes will be of interest to research workers in biology. zoology. ecology and physiology. but an additional aim is for the books to be accessible to a wide spectrum of non specialist readers ranging from undergraduates and postgraduates to those with an interest in industrial and commercial aspects of fish and fisheries.