The friendship of a brother and sister in California, united by their love of surfing, but divided by their parents' crumbling marriage. Medina sides with the father, a doctor, Jim with the ex-model mother.

Medina turns to surfing the waters off her Palos Verdes, California home as her family disintegrates.

Joy Nicholson's The Tribes of Palos Verdes is a Los Angeles Times bestseller and now a major motion picture starring Jennifer Garner, Maika Monroe, and Cody Fern. “Nicholson captures the California-coast culture. . . . Medina shows what it’s like to feel ‘six million years old’ way before your time."—Entertainment Weekly “Impressive . . . Captures what it is to be young, intelligent, and very alone.”—Us Weekly Medina Mason is a defiant, awkward fourteen-year-old living in the affluent beach community of Palos Verdes, California. The pressure is intense in their high-stakes world, and Medina’s family begins to break under the stress. Her parents’ marriage disintegrates and her beloved brother turns to drugs in order to cope. Medina turns to the ocean to escape it all. She surfs to survive, finding a bitter solace in the rough comfort of the waves. “An inspiring portrait of a young woman unswayed by other people’s pettiness” (Mademoiselle), this is the moving story of growing up “different,” of the love between siblings, and of one girl’s power to save herself

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST Kem Nunn’s “surf noir” classic is a thrilling plunge into the seedy underbelly of a Southern California beach town—the inspiration for the film Point Break. People go to Huntington Beach in search of the endless parties, the ultimate highs, and the perfect waves. Ike Tucker has come to look for his missing sister and for the three men who may have murdered her. In that place of gilded surfers and sun-bleached blonds, Ike’s search takes him on a journey through a twisted world of crazed Vietnam vets, sadistic surfers, drug dealers, and mysterious seducers. He looks into the shadows and finds parties that drift toward pointless violence, joyless vacations, and highs you may never come down from...and a sea of old hatreds and dreams gone bad. And if he’s not careful, his is a journey from which he will never return.

Sam Brown sets out on a road trip from his home in a small California desert town to the cooler, greener climes of the Northwest. He tells himself he just needs a break, from his father, a dead-end relationship with a stripper, his job as a nurse, and his troubled best friend. But what he can't escape, no matter how many miles he travels, is the memory of his mother, July, who was brutally murdered sixteen years earlier and visits him regularly in his dreams. Sam's grief is sorely renewed when he learns July's murderer is soon to be released from prison. Overcome by strong feelings of panic and revenge, he turns to women. He reconnects with a former patient in Los Angeles. In Santa Barbara he meets a sage/philosopher who inspires him to put order in his life. In Oregon, he falls in love with an arborist whose woodsy home provides peace and refuge-at least for a while. Simultaneous with Sam's journey, his mother's story unfolds, coming to a climax when the details of July's grisly murder are revealed. Through a fast-paced, gripping narrative, Heat Signature explores the complexities of family and friendship, love and loss, race and sexuality. Visit www.lisateasley.com

In this moving memoir about the power of friendship and the resilience of the human spirit, Amy Silverstein tells the story of the extraordinary group of women who supported her as she waited on the precipice for a life-saving heart transplant. Nearly twenty-six years after receiving her first heart transplant, Amy Silverstein’s donor heart plummeted into failure. If she wanted to live, she had to take on the grueling quest for a new heart—immediately. A shot at survival meant uprooting her life and moving across the country to California. When her friends heard of her plans, there was only one reaction: “I’m there.” Nine remarkable women—Joy, Jill, Leja, Jody, Lauren, Robin, Valerie, Ann, and Jane—put demanding jobs and pressing family obligations on hold to fly across the country and be by Amy’s side. Creating a calendar spreadsheet, the women—some of them strangers to one another—passed the baton of friendship, one to the next, and headed straight and strong into the battle to help save Amy’s life. Empowered by the kind of empathy that can only grow with age, these women, each knowing Amy from different stages of her life, banded together to provide her with something that medicine alone could not. Sleeping on a cot beside her bed, they rubbed her back and feet when the pain was unbearable, adorned her room with death-distracting decorations, and engaged in their “best talks ever.” They saw the true measure of their friend’s strength, and they each responded in kind. My Glory Was I Had Such Friends is a tribute to these women and the intense hours they spent together—hours of heightened emotion and self-awareness, where everything was laid bare. Candid and heartrending, this once-in-a-lifetime story of connection and empathy is a powerful reminder of the ultimate importance of “showing up” for those we love.

Seeking an escape from their lives in Los Angeles, lovers Nick and Sarah embark on what they hope will be a romantic adventure in the Mexican jungle but instead encounter a dangerous world of drugs, violence, and secret agendas.