That stereotype about the mid-life crisis involving smoking-hot flings with younger women? Yeah, turns out that might be true after all...Brooke has resigned herself to being single forever. She's almost 40 and practically married to her career. When she decides to take some time off to renovate a run-down farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, everyone tells her she's having a midlife crisis. Maybe she is, but she still thinks that buying the farmhouse is the best thing she's done in years. Now if only she could get the roof to stop leaking...Riley has always been a free spirit with nothing to her name besides the shirt on her back and a bag of tools. She's resourceful and knows what she's doing, but it turns out that it's still hard to make it as a woman in the trades. So when she hears about a major farmhouse renovation taking place, she jumps at the opportunity. She never would have imagined her new employer would be someone like Brooke, though...Sparks fly between Brooke and Riley as they're thrown together. The intensity of their attraction is matched only by the barriers to their relationship.Can two women who are polar opposites find a way to build a home together?

"DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE AND THE SHENANDOAH MADE ME WANT TO STRAP ON MY HIKING BOOTS." -Charles Covington In 1965, life on the morning side of the Blue Ridge Mountains feels far away from world events. Jerry Fletcher and David Williams are seniors at Rappahannock High School, ready to graduate and get on with their lives. They are more concerned with the baggage they have inherited from their parents than Civil Rights or the Gulf of Tonkin.Jerry is the only son of a family evicted from the mountains to make way for Shenandoah National Park. His path seemed set by family history and the comfort he finds in the mountains, but fate and war will take him away from home.David is the eldest son of a local fundamentalist preacher. His future seemed set in the ministry, but experiences guide him down a path that differs from his father's expectations and he must reconcile his changing world view with the values he holds dear.Debut novelist James G. Brown has published articles on life in rural Virginia and books in the fields of agroindustry and rural development and lives in the shadow of the Blue Ridge."SO MUCH TO ENJOY IN THIS POWERFUL GENERATIONAL STORY" -Charles Burnell

From the author of the acclaimed The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle comes a tale of traffic jams, secret plans, and one eleven-year-old boy's determination to save his family's livelihood. Rick Rusek's stomach has a lot to say. It's got opinions on tasty foods, not-so-tasty foods, and driving in traffic-jammed Los Angeles makes it roil, boil, gurgle, and howl. It's doing the best it can. It never meant to earn its owner the nickname Carsick Rick or make him change schools for fifth grade. And Rick's stomach isn't the only one dealing with terrible traffic. His family's catering service, Smotch, is teetering on the verge of ruin after a rash of late deliveries and missed appointments. Fortunately, Rick has the solution. Unfortunately, no one wants to listen to a kid. Absolutely certain that he could fix the constant, endless traffic snarls, Rick hatches a plan. But he'll need help from his unicorn-loving Girl Scout neighbor, a famous street artist, and the best driver in L.A. Together they'll take on the stream of stalled cars--and a secret conspiracy or two, too. It's going to be tough, but Rick won't give up. If he can successfully move the 330,000 slow-moving cars standing in the way of his family's future, maybe everyone will see that he's not Carsick Rick. He's one of the seven wonders of Los Angeles. He's the Colossus of Roads.

Polly Giller returned to Iowa from Boston to start a new life, not that her old one was all that bad. With her inheritance, she purchased an old school building in Bellingwood and is in the middle of renovating it when the bones of two bodies are pulled out of a ceiling.The whole town knows who those bones belong to, but when she also finds crates and crates of items from the sixties through the early nineties in the old root cellar, they wonder if the two things are connected.A welcoming committee shows up at Polly's front door and these women soon become her fast friends. Fortunately, the leader of the group is married to the Sheriff and he is there to make sure mysteries are solved and everyone stays safe, but when Polly's old boyfriend from Boston shows up, that becomes a little more difficult. The women might be a little older than Polly, but she finds out they might be even more wild than the friends she had when living back east. Lydia Merritt, the Sheriff's wife, is a woman filled with love and passion. Beryl Watson is an artist and more than a little flamboyant. Andy Saner wants to organize and label the world, but loves with a great big heart and Sylvie Donovan, with her two young sons is trying to make it as a single mother. The men in Polly's world are just as interesting. Henry Sturtz is the carpenter and contractor in charge of construction and might have a little crush on his boss, while Doug Randall and Billy Endicott are her Jedi Knights in Shining Armor. Polly's immediate family might be gone, but her new family offers a great deal of love, fun and entertainment.Read along as the extraordinary, yet quite ordinary, people in Bellingwood tell their stories.

"Hair-raising... includes not just Hitler’s depredations but Stalin’s too—a double measure of evil."—The Wall Street Journal An epic and uplifting World War II family history of resistance that spans Europe, telling of two happy families uprooted by war, their incredible suffering under Hitler and Stalin, and the near-miraculous survival stories of the author's mother and father. "Moving and important."—Robert Harris, author of Act of Oblivion In Two Roads Home beloved British journalist Daniel Finkelstein tells the extraordinary story of the years before his mother met his father—years of war and trials they barely survived. Daniel Finkelstein's grandfather was a German Jewish intellectual leader who tolled an early warning of the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes. He relocated his family to safety in Amsterdam, where they knew Anne Frank. But in those years safety was an illusion: Anne Frank famously went into hiding and Daniel's mother, Mirjam, also still a child, was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and sisters. Finkelstein's father, Ludwik, grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Poland where his father, Dolu was a patriotic hero of the Great War. But when Stalin took control, Dolu, was deported to Siberia and Ludwik and his mother were sentenced to forced labor in Kazakhstan, starved and housed in a stable in freezing conditions. Two Roads Home is a page-turning account of the narrow escapes, forged passports, ingenuity, bravery, and luck that allowed Mirjam and Ludwik to survive the war and find each other. Using their personal testimony, letters sent to Siberia, a diary written in Belsen, and years of historical research, Daniel Finkelstein tells what happened to two families, one the victim of the Nazis, the other of the Soviets. A tale of deliverance and triumph over evil, Two Roads Home will profoundly touch all who read it.