Oumar Farouk Sesay was resident playwright of Bai Bureh Theatre in the hay days during the 1980s. Several of his plays were performed in the then City Hall which won him accolades amongst his peers. He wrote for local and international newspapers and has been published in anthologies of Sierra Leonean poets. His poems have been translated into German and Spanish.

This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review). Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

A firsthand, personal view of a family on the front lines of war in Israel “An outstanding work . . . powerfully and movingly written.”—Jerusalem Post WINNER OF THE “BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE” AWARD In the summer of 1998, Daniel Gordis and his family moved to Israel from Los Angeles. They planned to be there for a year, but a few months into their stay, Daniel and his wife decided to remain in Jerusalem permanently, confident that their children would be among the first generation of Israelis to grow up in peace. Immediately after arriving in Israel, Daniel had started sending out e-mails about his life to friends and family abroad. These missives—passionate, thoughtful, beautifully written, and informative—began reaching a much broader readership than he’d ever envisioned, eventually being excerpted in The New York Times Magazine to much acclaim. An edited and finely crafted collection of Daniel’s original e-mails, If a Place Can Make You Cry is a first-person, immediate account of Israel’s post-Oslo meltdown that cuts through the rhetoric and stridency of most dispatches from that country or from the international media. Above all, If a Place Can Make You Cry tells the story of a family that must cope with the sudden realization that they took their children from a serene and secure neighborhood in Los Angeles to an Israel not at peace but mired in war. This is the chronicle of a loss of innocence—the innocence of Daniel and his wife, and of their children. Ultimately, through Daniel’s eyes, Israel, with all its beauty, madness, violence, and history, comes to life in a way we’ve never quite seen before.

What could cause a mother to believe that giving away her newborn baby is her only option? Cathy Glass is about to find out. From author of Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller Damaged comes a harrowing and moving memoir about tiny Harrison, left in Cathy’s care, and the potentially fatal family secret of his beginnings.

Brooks Haxton’s poetry has celebrated for thirty years our troubled pleasures in the daily world. This new collection, titled after a meditation on the cry of the snowy tree cricket, gives us his most moving response to the ferocious beauty of nature and to the folly and magnificence of human undertakings. In the opening poem, the poet comes home drunk without his key, collapses in the yard, and looks up to where, he says: Whorls of a magnetic field exfoliated under the solar wind, so that the northern lights above me trembled. No: that was the porch light blurred by tears. With this self-deprecating wit and tenderness toward human failings, these poems search through history into the wilderness of our origins, and through the self into the mysterious presences of people we love. A master of moods—as when a poem of grief after the death of a friend becomes a sprightly litany of her favorite wildflowers—Haxton is a poet who summons essences of thought and feeling in a few words, creating both narratives and miniatures that are rich in possibility beyond the page. ISAAC’S ROOM, EMPTY, 4 A.M. From the dark tree at his window blossoms battered by the rain fell into the summer grass, white horns, all spattered down the throat with purple ink, while unseen birds, with creaks and peeps and whistles, started the machinery of daybreak.

The Cry of the Hangkaka is the story of young Karin and her mother Irene. Shamed by a divorce, Irene seeks to flee with her daughter from post WWII South Africa. Jack, a Scotsman who works at the tin mines in Nigeria, seems to be the answer to Irene's prayers. In the torrid heat of the Nigerian plateau, Karin is exposed to the lives of the colonisers, the colonised, and most of all to the dictatorship of Jack.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • She finds lost children—all the while trying to outrun the brutal emotions stemming from a tragedy in her past. Milla Edge is fueled by an obsession to fill the void in other people’s lives. Traveling to a small village in Mexico on a reliable tip, she begins to uncover the dire fate of countless children who have disappeared in the labyrinth of a sinister baby-smuggling ring. The key to nailing down the organization may rest with an elusive one-eyed man. As Milla’s search for him intensifies, the mission becomes more treacherous. For the ring is part of something far larger and more dangerous, reaching the highest echelons of power. Racing into peril, Milla suddenly finds herself the hunted—in the crosshairs of an invisible, lethal assassin who aims to silence her permanently. Praise for Cry No More “Linda Howard is a superbly original storyteller.”—Iris Johansen “Intense and darkly mesmerizing from beginning to end, this gut-wrenching roller coaster of a book is incredible! The bestselling Howard delivers first-class terror and suspense.”—Romantic Times “Linda Howard meshes hot sex, emotional impact, and gripping tension.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)