A six-hundred-mile canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness is a seventeen-year-old's dream adventure, but after he is mauled by a grizzly bear, it's all about staying alive. This true-life wilderness survival epic recounts seventeen-year-old Alex Messenger's near-lethal encounter with a grizzly bear during a canoe trip in the Canadian tundra. The story follows Alex and his five companions as they paddle north through harrowing rapids and stunning terrain. Twenty-nine days into the trip, while out hiking alone, Alex is attacked by a barren-ground grizzly. Left for dead, he wakes to find that his summer adventure has become a struggle to stay alive. Over the next hours and days, Alex and his companions tend his wounds and use their resilience, ingenuity, and dogged perseverance to reach help at a remote village a thousand miles north of the US-Canadian border. The Twenty-Ninth Day is a coming-of-age story like no other, filled with inspiring subarctic landscapes, thrilling riverine paddling, and a trial by fire of the human spirit.

A lily pond, so the French riddle goes, contains a single leaf. Each day the number of leaves doubles--two leaves the second day, four the third, eight the fourth, and so on. Question: If the pond is completely full on the thirtieth day, when is it half full? Answer: On the Twenty-ninth day.

Wild, lyrical poems that examine the connections between physical and interior migration, from award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, author of Salt Houses.

A magnificent new novel from one of America’s finest writers—a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn. On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife—that “the hours of his life . . . belonged to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence, and yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives—testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable delicacy, heart, and intelligence, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today.

In this “powerful story about the healing every man needs” (John Eldredge, New York Times bestselling author), a near-fatal attack by an enraged grizzly bear leads to an unexpected encounter with God for alpha male Greg Matthews. Greg Matthews was the ultimate poster-boy for masculinity. Avid hunter and outdoorsman, Air Force and civilian firefighter, EMT, rescue helicopter pilot, fugitive recovery agent, Ground Zero volunteer and more, Greg had spent his whole life striving to serve others but for all the wrong reasons. After his parents’ divorce when he was young, Greg believed deep down that the only way he could be loved and valued—by his father, by his family, and by God—was if he earned it through daring, high-stakes, high-risk—what society commonly refers to as “manly”—achievements. But everything changed when an idyllic hunting trip through the backwoods of Alaska turned into a harrowing fight for his life. Greg was attacked by a grizzly bear—but the gruesome, nearly fatal conflict offered an unexpected encounter with God. Greg’s eyes, and more importantly, his heart, were finally opened to the lie that he’d internalized as a child: that his dangerously high-risk achievements were the sole signifiers of his worth. The road to recovery was long and painful, but it forced Greg to come face-to-face with the long-held view of manhood he had absorbed as his own identity. The relentless grizzly uncovered something in Greg’s heart: that he was being pursued by an equally persistent God, who loved him unconditionally. A gripping tale of survival and a rebuttal to outdated notions about masculinity, Wild Awakening “will help you lead a life of greater purpose” (John O’Leary, author of On Fire).

Told in unflinching detail, this is the story of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, also known as the Giddings Regiment or the Abolition Regiment, after its founder, radical abolitionist Congressman J. R. Giddings. The men who enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth OVI were, according to its lore, handpicked to ensure each was as pure in his antislavery beliefs as its founder. Whether these soldiers would fight harder than other soldiers, and whether the people of their hometowns would remain devoted to the ideals of the regiment, were questions that could only be tested by the experiment of war. The Untried Life is the story of these men from their very first regimental formation in a county fairground to the devastation of Gettysburg and the march to Atlanta and back again, enduring disease and Confederate prisons. It brings to vivid life the comradeship and loneliness that pervaded their days on the march. Dozens of unforgettable characters emerge, animated by their own letters and diaries: Corporal Nathan Parmenter, whose modest upbringing belies the eloquence of his writings; Colonel Lewis Buckley, one of the Twenty-Ninth’s most charismatic officers; and Chaplain Lyman Ames, whose care of the sick and wounded challenged his spiritual beliefs. The Untried Life shows how the common soldier lived—his entertainments, methods of cooking, medical treatment, and struggle to maintain family connections—and separates the facts from the mythology created in the decades after the war.

The ninth collection of Sherman's Lagoon strips, featuring Sherman the shark and his friends on Kapupu Island.