A Thousand Farewells is the heartfelt and personal chronicle of a journalist who has devoted her career to covering one of the world’s most volatile regions. In 1976, Nahlah Ayed’s family gave up a comfortable life in Winnipeg for the squalor of a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. The transition was jarring but it was during this unsettling period that Ayed first closely observed the people whose heritage she shared. She had to become accustomed to rudimentary housing and crowded streets, unfamiliar social customs, and the prevailing mood of loss and mourning. But it was hearing the family’s stories of exile and displacement that profoundly affected her. The family returned to Canada when Ayed was thirteen, and the Middle East and its problems receded for many years. But the First Gulf War and the events of 9/11 reignited her interest. And as an Arabic-speaking journalist, she was soon reporting from the region full time, covering its dangerous conflicts and trying to make sense of the wars and upheavals that have affected its people and sent so many of them seeking a better life elsewhere. In A Thousand Farewells, Ayed vividly describes the myriad ways in which ordinary Arabs have coped with oppression and loss. From her own early days witnessing protests in Amman to watching the amazing Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya, Ayed offers nuanced and insightful analysis. Throughout, she focuses on the people whose lives have been so dramatically affected.

''A Farewell to Arms'' is Hemingway's classic set during the Italian campaign of World War I. The book, published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant ("Tenente") in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. It's about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of ''A Farewell to Arms'' cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I."

In this “exquisite personal blend of philosophy and engagement, inner quiet and worldly life" (Los Angeles Times), an acclaimed author returns to his longtime home in Japan after his father-in-law’s sudden death and picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites, reminding us to take nothing for granted. In a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honoring the dead, Pico Iyer comes to reflect on changelessness in ways that anyone can relate to: parents age, children scatter, and Iyer and his wife turn to whatever can sustain them as everything falls away. As the maple leaves begin to turn and the heat begins to soften, Iyer shows us a Japan we have seldom seen before, where the transparent and the mysterious are held in a delicate balance.

A book of poetic essays written in English, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is full of religious inspirations. With the twelve illustrations drawn by the author himself, the book took more than eleven years to be formulated and perfected and is Gibran's best-known work. It represents the height of his literary career as he came to be noted as ‘the Bard of Washington Street.’ Captivating and vivified with feeling, The Prophet has been translated into forty languages throughout the world, and is considered the most widely read book of the twentieth century. Its first edition of 1300 copies sold out within a month.