Our heroine in Part One of the Muslim Romance Trilogy—The Year I Learned to Text; Why Am I Having Sex with a Muslim in My Basement?— actress/comedian/realtor Julie, returns and is now sixty-two. Her Marriage Islam-Style husband is forty. Her chemical addiction to the black-eyed, always-tardy Persian Prince remains insatiable, as her two loyal dogs and opinionated cat watch it all go down. When the honeymooners’ salacious pillow talk turns to Taliban training camps, dropping walls on homosexuals, and killing Republican presidents, conservative Julie must choose between love of country and the greatest physical and spiritual connection she’s ever known. “A truly out-of-the-box articulate storyteller, if Ms. Montague has not yet succeeded in having the Ayatollahs issue a fatwa against her, she surely will be successful this time. Juliet’s hysterically funny romantic satire will soon become a collector’s item when Jihad Honeymoon in Hollywood is banned along with the author, when she is placed in the informal witness program along with Salman Rushdie. Be sure to take home Book No. 2 in The Muslim Romance Trilogy today, so you can say you knew her when.”- Steven Emerson,author of American Jihad; the Terrorists Living Among Us. “The Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy is an unintentionally humorous lap cat compared to the Bengal cougar of this long-awaited sequel to The Year I Learned to Text; Why Am I Having Sex with a Muslim in My Basement? Juliet Montague continues to weave more colorful erotic tales in this intentionally funny, heartbreaking saga of love gone wrong.”- C. Stephen Foster,author of Awakening the Actor Within

Mark Andrew Ritchie (featured in Schwager’s best-selling Market Wizards II) grew up in the poverty and strangeness of Afghanistan, the deep south of Texas, and an Oregon-coast logging town. The Vietnam War crystallized his love of rebellion. He became an occupational vagabond--funeral home operative, Chicago Transit bus driver, long-haul trucker, jail guard, and more--an unlikely backdrop for launching a career in the take-no-prisoners financial markets of Chicago. But as a backdrop for a writer? Perfect. Ritchie has been quoted, “Islamic people are the kindest, most loving, most hospitable people in the world.” Then he claims that when he saw the second plane hit tower one, he knew that the Islamic people he played with as a child had finally brought their jihad to America. Is he credible? Ritchie theorizes that America has a blind spot--spiritual engagement. Nineteen hijackers traveled spiritual roads that caused that fateful day. We avoid this discussion; it’s too personal. God in the Pits is Ritchie’s personal jihad. One event forced the questions—the sudden death of Mark's father in faraway Afghanistan, where the elder Ritchie was constructing a provincial hospital for the treatment of blindness. To Mark, the contrast between his life and that of his father was brutal: "His goal was to do God's will by serving the Afghan poor; mine was to buy low and sell high." As Mark travels back to his boyhood in Afghanistan to settle his father's affairs and see to his mother's hospital care, he casts back over his early experiences with death, with a life too full of the unexpected, and with nagging inner questions over things that matter most.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

Azadeh Moaveni, longtime Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, returns to Iran to cover the rise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Living and working in Tehran, she finds a nation that openly yearns for freedom and contact with the West but whose economic grievances and nationalist spirit find an outlet in Ahmadinejad’s strident pronouncements. And then the unexpected happens: Azadeh falls in love with a young Iranian man and decides to get married and start a family in Tehran. Suddenly, she finds herself navigating an altogether different side of Iranian life. As women are arrested for “immodest dress” and the authorities unleash a campaign of intimidation against journalists, Azadeh is forced to make the hard decision that her family’s future lies outside Iran. Powerful and poignant, Honeymoon in Tehran is the harrowing story of a young woman’s tenuous life in a country she thought she could change.

Thriller.

Jacky was twenty-three when she arrived in Egypt for a holiday with her boyfriend, Dave. Little did she know that an innocent holiday would result in a horror beyond her imagination. Separated from Dave in a bustling street, Jacky fell and twisted her ankle, only to be swept up by a handsome, chivalrous Egyptian called Omar. It was love at first sight. Jacky spent those ten days living with the family - sharing a bed with Omar's sister - irresistibly attracted to Omar. Swept away by her infatuation she married him and converted to Islam before returning to England to her parents. Returning to Cairo against her parents' advice but full of hopes and plans, Jacky's dream turned into a nightmare. As a blue-eyed blonde she was never going to fit in with life in a poor suburb where the women walked at all times with their heads bowed. During the next eight years she suffered non-stop physical and emotional abuse. She had to escape with her two little girls but how? This tense story never quite ends. Even now, Jacky is living in the shadow of a death threat. A fatwa is issued legitimately under Islamic law to a Muslim woman who leaves her husband. Jacky to protect herself and her daughters minute by minute, day by day, never quite sure what may be around the corner...

As a young British officer in the Gurkha regiment, John Mackinlay served in the rainforests of North Borneo and experienced firsthand the Maoist-style insurgencies of the 1960s. Years later, as a United Nations researcher, he witnessed the chaotic deployment of international forces to Africa, the Balkans, and South Asia, and the transformation of territorial, labor-intensive uprisings into the international insurgent networks we know today. After 9/11, Mackinlay turned his eye toward the Muslim communities of Europe and institutional efforts to prevent terrorism. In particular, he investigates military expeditions to Iraq and Afghanistan and their effect on the social cohesion of European populations that include Muslims from these regions. In a world divided between rich and poor, the surest way for the "bottom billion" to gain recognition, express outrage, or improve their circumstances is through insurgency. In this book, Mackinlay explains why leaders from the wealthiest and most powerful nations have failed to understand this phenomenon. Our current bin Laden era, Mckinlay argues, must be viewed as one stage in a series of developments swept up in the momentum of a global insurgency. The campaigns of the 1960s are directly linked to the global movements of tomorrow, yet in the past two decades, insurgent activity has given rise to a new practice that incorporates and exploits the "propaganda of the deed." This shift challenges our vertically-structured response to terror and places a greater emphasis on mastering the virtual, cyber-based dimensions of these campaigns. Mckinlay revisits the roots of global insurgencies, describes their nature and character, reveals the power of mass communications and grievance, and recommends how individual nations can counter these threats by focusing on domestic terrorism.