Dive under the surface to where it all started...

Life is not always as it seems on the surface...

The truth will always rise to the surface...

Pearl's Secret is a remarkable autobiography and family story that combines elements of history, investigative reporting, and personal narrative in a riveting, true-to-life mystery. In it, Neil Henry—a black professor of journalism and former award-winning correspondent for the Washington Post—sets out to piece together the murky details of his family's past. His search for the white branch of his family becomes a deeply personal odyssey, one in which Henry deploys all of his journalistic skills to uncover the paper trail that leads to blood relations who have lived for more than a century on the opposite side of the color line. At the same time Henry gives a powerful and vivid account of his black family's rise to success over the twentieth century. Throughout the course of this gripping story the author reflects on the part that racism and racial ignorance have played in his daily life—from his boyhood in largely white Seattle to his current role as a parent and educator in California. The contemporary debate over the significance of Thomas Jefferson's longtime romantic relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and recent DNA evidence that points to his role as the father of black descendants, have revealed the importance and volatility of the issue of dual-race legacies in American society. As Henry uncovers the dramatic history of his great-great-grandfather—a white English immigrant who fought as a Confederate officer in the Civil War, found success during Reconstruction as a Louisiana plantation owner, and enjoyed a long love affair with Henry's great-great-grandmother, a freed black slave—he grapples with an unsettling ambivalence about what he is trying to do. His straightforward, honest voice conveys both the pain and the exhilaration that his revelations bring him about himself, his family, and our society. In the book's stunning climax, the author finally meets his white kin, hears their own remarkable story of survival in America, and discovers a great deal about both the sting of racial prejudice as it is woven into the fabric of the nation, and his own proud identity as a teacher, father, and black American.

Newly married, Oliver and Lisa are having the time of their lives in their small Alaskan town. The kids are thriving, and so is the family business. The café and woodshop are everything Oliver and Lisa dreamt of, and they almost believe they have it all. Until their world is shattered by the news of Oliver's sister's death. Death by suicide, the police say. The local sheriff arrives at the café and tells them the news, and Oliver must face his past, something that threatens to drag him down into an unseen darkness. Oliver starts to drink, and it threatens to tear their family apart. Determined to heal Oliver's wound and keep her family together, Lisa investigates his sister's disappearance ten years ago. The more she digs, the more dangerous it gets until she realizes she has put her own family in great danger. She uncovers an unsettling secret that has been buried for years underneath the small town's thick ice. A Sister's Secret is the third and last installment in the Forever and Always trilogy by romance author Nora Bloom.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Brenda Novak pens the fan-favorite story of a recently divorced woman and the surprising, powerful ways she’s able to rebuild her family. After a painful divorce, Maisey Lazarow returns to Fairham, the small island off the South Carolina coast where she grew up. She goes there to heal—and to help her brother, Keith, a deeply troubled man who's asked her to come home. But she refuses to stay in the family house. The last person she wants to see is the wealthy, controlling mother she escaped years ago. Instead, she finds herself living next door to someone else she'd prefer to avoid—Rafe Romero, the wild, reckless boy to whom she lost her virginity at sixteen. He's back on the island, and to her surprise, he's raising a young daughter alone. Maisey's still attracted to him, but her heart's too broken to risk… Then something even more disturbing happens. She discovers a box of photographs that evoke distant memories of a little girl, a child Keith remembers, too. Maisey believes the girl must've been their sister, but their mother claims there was no sister. Maisey is convinced that child existed. So where is she now? Previously published.

When Jesselynn Highwood discovers that her destination in Missouri has been ravaged, she sets out on the Oregon Trail, while her "sister Louisa has taken on the daunting task of smuggling desperately needed supplies for the hospital in Richmond."--Cover.