Sixteen-year-old Frieder' s plans for the summer are shattered when he fails two subjects. To be able to move up to the next year in the Autumn, he needs to resit his exams. So instead of going on holiday with his family, he now faces the daunting and boring prospect of staying at his grandparents' house, studying with his strict and formal step-grandfather. On the bright side, he' ll spend time with his grandmother Nana, his sister Alma and his best friend Johann. And he meets Beate, the girl in the beautiful green swimsuit... The next few weeks will bring friendship, fear and first love &– one grand summer that will change and shape his entire life. A number-one bestseller in Germany and winner of the German Booksellers Prize, One Grand Summer is a moving, beautiful and profound novel about relationships and respect that captures those exquisite and painful moments that make us who we are...

When Jack Canfield is told he has a terminal illness and that he has weeks to live, his first concern is for his beloved wife, Lizzie, and children, baby Jack, Cory and rebellious teenager Mikki. On Christmas Eve, when Lizzie comes home, Jack is devastated to see his neighbour, Bill Miller, kiss Lizzie on their driveway. Jack confronts her, she tries to explain he's got it all wrong, and distraught, she leaves the house into an ice storm - and a fatal collision with a truck. Overwhelmed with grief, and with his illness worsening Jack is taken into a hospital. The children move to the West Coast to live with various members of the family. But then a miracle happens. Jack begins to recover, and day by day he starts to heal. Confounding the doctors, Jack leaves the hospital without any evidence of the illness. Unexpectedly the family inherits a beautiful old villa with a lighthouse on the beach in South Carolina. It was the house where Lizzie grew up and Jack feels an inexplicable closeness to her while he's there. Although his mother-in-law, Bonnie, has other ideas for their future, Jack knows that this is the chance he has to re-build his relationship with his kids. And as he struggles to reconnect with the children, he also has the chance to find love again, perhaps even with Lizzie's help.

Eleven-year-old Delphine has it together. Even though her mother, Cecile, abandoned her and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, seven years ago. Even though her father and Big Ma will send them from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to stay with Cecile for the summer. And even though Delphine will have to take care of her sisters, as usual, and learn the truth about the missing pieces of the past. When the girls arrive in Oakland in the summer of 1968, Cecile wants nothing to do with them. She makes them eat Chinese takeout dinners, forbids them to enter her kitchen, and never explains the strange visitors with Afros and black berets who knock on her door. Rather than spend time with them, Cecile sends Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern to a summer camp sponsored by a revolutionary group, the Black Panthers, where the girls get a radical new education. Set during one of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, one crazy summer is the heartbreaking, funny tale of three girls in search of the mother who abandoned them—an unforgettable story told by a distinguished author of books for children and teens, Rita Williams-Garcia.

WINNER: 2017 QLD Literary Awards, Children's Fiction It struck Henry that perhaps he was waiting for the exact right moment to be daring and brave. The exact right moment where he felt no worry at all, not one tiny flicker. But what if that moment never came? Henry Hoobler is a reluctant adventurer who is worried about his summer holiday camping at the beach: bugs, spiders, snakes, stingers, blue-ringed octopi or sharks. Worst of all, his family and friends are pushing him to ride his new silver bike - without training wheels. But when Henry meets Cassie, he discovers that courage is there to be found when you have a friend who is straight-up and true. A joyous, heart-warming story from the much-loved author of My Big Birkett.

Stepmotherland is a tour-de-force debut collection about coming of age, coming out, and coming to America. Winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same. Holnes’s poems experiment with macaronic language, literary forms, and prosody. In their inventiveness, they create a new tradition that blurs the borders between poetry, visual art, and dramatic text. The new legacy he creates is one with significant reverence for the past, which informs a central desire of immigrants and native-born citizens alike: the desire for a better life. Stepmotherland documents an artist’s evolution into manhood and heralds the arrival of a stunning new poetic voice.

In 1951, eighteen-year-old Lee Bouvier and her twenty-two-year-old sister Jacqueline took their first trip to Europe together. Jackie had already spent a year in France living with a French family and attending the Sorbonne. Her many cards and letters had made her sister Lee want nothing more than to see Europe with Jackie. Having convinced their parents, the two young ladies set off to see the continent. As they traveled, they sketched and kept notes, creating an illustrated journal of their time abroad, which they presented to their parents as a thank you upon their return; that delightful chronicle is ONE SPECIAL SUMMER. Join Jackie and Lee for a tantalizing glimpse of a lost world: crossing the Atlantic by ocean liner, visits with counts and ambassadors in Paris, art lessons in Venice, and white gloves in the afternoon. Smile at the social agonies all young women suffer in common--how to politely consume an oversized hors d'oeuvre, the horror of slipping undergarments, and the art of fending off unwanted romantic advances.

Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years. In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick’s groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O’Brien has called “the principal crux of female despair”: the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of “urban peasants,” Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother’s romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick’s struggle to find herself in love and in work. As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader’s admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter’s mother. Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre. “[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters...[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times