During a season of factory closings and job losses, the small town of Bennington loses sight of the hope of the season. Angelina, a young girl who faces life from a wheelchair, knows that a life without hope is not a life and she formulates a plan to help bring the joy of Christmas back to her town. With a little ingenuity and the helping hands of her brothers and sister, Angelina's motto 'Share the gift and share the hope' transforms a town in despair into a town that remembers the true meaning of Christmas.

Explores the performance of aging in the "late style" of Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser. Demographers say that by the year 2060, every seventh person in Germany will be aged eighty or older, and every third person over sixty-five. The prediction for other Western countries is scarcely different. Indeed, the aging society is seen by some as a graver threat than even global warming, with potentially unmanageable tensions relating to intergenerational relationships, work and benefits, and flows of people. This book explores the representation and performance of aging in recent "late-style" German-language fiction. It situates the authors chosen as case studies -- Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser -- in their biographical and social contexts and explores the significance of their aesthetic figuring of aging for debates raging both in Germany and internationally. In particular, the book looks at gender, generations, and trauma and their impact on how writers "narrativize" aging. Finally, it examines the "timeliness" of these different representations and late-style performances of aging in the context of the shift of social, political, and economic power away from the declining societies of theWest to the ascendant societies of the East. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

Lucy Love goes out with her two best friends to a nightclub on her twenty first birthday. Betrayed by her friends and leaving the nightclub in a drugged state, she is run over and killed. Taken up to Heaven she is charged to become one of Heaven's Angels and is sent back to Earth to watch over and guide those in need. In her work she guards over a baby boy called Neaven Stars and watches him grow up into a fine, handsome, young man. She comes to love him dearly and feel that he is her soul mate. She returns to Heaven to plead with God that she might return to Earth to be with him. Her wish is granted but there is a condition—she won't have any memory of Neaven, nor who she was, and so her new life begins. Set in modern day Ireland, this heartwarming story is a moving tale of hope and love both lost and regained.

Angelina’s arrival at Wrey House forces her mother, the countess, to accept a daughter she didn’t know existed. But her sister, the exotic Rosabelle, may not be her twin at all. And who is the Highwayman—an enigmatic second son or the bastard half-brother imprisoned for the crime? Angelina knows but refuses to betray, though it ruins her chances for happiness. Historical Romance by Janet Woods; originally published by Robert Hale [UK]