Nobody wants Tulip in their gang. She skives off school, cheeks the teachers and makes herself unpopular with her classmates by telling awful lies. None of this matters to Natalie who finds Tulip exciting. At first she doesn't care that other people are upset and unnerved by Tulip's bizarre games, but as the games become increasingly sinister and dangerous, Natalie realises that Tulip is going too far. Much too far. Racing, in fact, to the novel's shocking ending.

Denice is an all-out tomboy and proud of it. She was born in the Deep South in 1950. Her claim to fame is, she can burp louder than anyone on her street. If need be, Denice knows she can whoop any boy's tail.Denice's mother, Nellie May, suffers from severe depression and struggles with every breath to raise her five children: Janice, the hippie; Pam, the beauty queen; Denice, the tomboy, and the two youngest, Lee Ann and Charlie.Charles, the father, is a con man, habitual liar, and self-proclaimed ladies' man. He makes a buck any way he can, including coffee salesman, bootlegging, running a whorehouse, and a doctor. His lifestyle continually brings chaos and heartbreak to the home and drags them to the depths when he molests one of his children. On a cold morning, Charles wakes Denice up to help him plant Plastic Tulips In The Winter. "Daddy," she asks, "Why are we planting plastic tulips in the winter?" He answered her, "Because Denice when people drive by and see our tulips, we will be the only ones that can grow tulips in the winter."Denice learns that a fatherless child grows up thinking all things are possible, but nothing is safe. She searches for the answer to the question: "Momma, are we there yet?"Get ready to laugh, but keep the Kleenex close by as you take this life-changing journey with Denice.

A stranger’s life hangs in the balance. But to save him is to risk everything. The war is drawing to a close, but the Nazis still occupy part of the Netherlands. After the losses she’s endured, war widow Cornelia is only a shadow of the woman she once was. She fights now to protect her younger brother, Johan, who lives in hiding. When Johan brings Gerrit Laninga, a wounded Dutch Resistance member, to Cornelia’s doorstep, their ives are forever altered. Although scared of the consequences of harboring a wanted man, Cornelia’s faith won’t let her turn him out. As she nurses Gerrit back to health, she is drawn to his fierce passion and ideals, and notices a shift within herself. Gerrit’s intensity challenges her, making her want to live fully, despite the fear that constrains her. When the opportunity to join him in the Resistance presents itself, Cornelia must summon every ounce of courage imaginable. She is as terrified of loving Gerrit as she is of losing him. But as the winter landscape thaws, so too does her heart. Will she get a second chance at true love? She fears their story will end before it even begins.

In a riveting exploration of the power the past wields over the present, critically acclaimed author Antoinette van Heugten writes the story of a woman whose child's life hangs in the balance, forcing her to confront the roots of her family's troubled history in the dark days of World War II… It's the stuff of nightmares: Nora de Jong returns home from work one ordinary day to find her mother has been murdered. Her infant daughter is missing. And the only clue is the body of an unknown man on the living-room floor, clutching a Luger in his cold, dead hand. Frantic to find Rose, Nora puts aside her grief and frustration with the local police to start her own search. But the contents of a locked metal box she finds in her parents' attic leave her with as many questions as answers—and suggest the killer was not a stranger. Saving her daughter means delving deeper into her family's darkest history, leading Nora half a world away to Amsterdam, where her own unsettled past and memories of painful heartbreak rush back to haunt her. As Nora feverishly pieces together the truth from an old family diary, she's drawn back to a city under Nazi occupation, where her mother's alliances may have long ago sealed her own–and Rose's—fate.

Alterities marks an advance to a new stage of critical theory. Dealing with literature from Shakespeare and Donne to Calvino, with philosophy from the medieval to the contemporary, with cinema from popular to art-film, and with political theory from Marx to Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Badiou, Thomas Docherty intervenes in all the major contemporary cultural debates to propose and practice a new criticism, whose theoretical foundations lie in a postmodern ethics, ecopolitics, and an austere attention to the radical difficulties of art. Bound together by the cohesive drive of Docherty's intelligence and the coerciveness of the arguments he enlarges about alterity and historicity, Alterities rehabilitates the question of why we bother about art, and proposes new modes of critical engagement with contemporary culture

Anna’s father gives her the most wonderful present for her birthday—eight beautiful tulips! But tulips in Holland in the 1600s are more precious than gold or jewels, and everyone who walks by the house wants to trade her for one!