Bones of Home and Other Plays weaves the splendor and decay of New Orleans with its past and present and then spirals out from its New Orleans center like delicate threads of a web. This collection of plays brings a broad range of writing styles with contemporary and historical plays. The contemporary plays spring forth from the questions of our times: How does the downward economy change family dynamics? How can uncontrollable crime bring people together? How does our penchant for youth at all costs influence friendships? How can a lonely soul find strength within? The historic plays complicated by Louisiana lore offer a look at what remains the same and what has changed through the years. The historic plays resonate with struggles we continue to confront today, amid themes of race, gender, and power. Donaghy embraces her characters lives, complicated by choices between disparate worlds, with care and a hunger to explore. Her characters choices are about good and evil, hope and loss, faith and doubt and often involve a search for the meaning of home.

Fables, folktales, and myths are brought to life in plays to be read or staged by children

Zach, Alice, and Poppy, friends from a Pennsylvania middle school who have long enjoyed acting out imaginary adventures with dolls and action figures, embark on a real-life quest to Ohio to bury a doll made from the ashes of a dead girl. Illustrations.

Nora Roberts, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the epic Year One returns with Of Blood and Bone, a new tale of terror and magick in a brand new world. They look like an everyday family living an ordinary life. But beyond the edges of this peaceful farm, unimaginable forces of light and dark have been unleashed. Fallon Swift, approaching her thirteenth birthday, barely knows the world that existed before—the city where her parents lived, now in ruins and reclaimed by nature since the Doom sickened and killed billions. Traveling anywhere is a danger, as vicious gangs of Raiders and fanatics called Purity Warriors search for their next victim. Those like Fallon, in possession of gifts, are hunted—and the time is coming when her true nature, her identity as The One, can no longer be hidden. In a mysterious shelter in the forest, her training is about to begin under the guidance of Mallick, whose skills have been honed over centuries. She will learn the old ways of healing; study and spar; encounter faeries and elves and shifters; and find powers within herself she never imagined. And when the time is right, she will take up the sword, and fight. For until she grows into the woman she was born to be, the world outside will never be whole again.

Join Kit Livingstone on a mind-bending quest to unlock the secrets of the multiverse in this epic fantasy adventure series. After discovering the truth about alternate realities from his great-grandfather Cosimo in a rainy alley in London, Kit is on the run and on a mission to restore a map that charts the hidden dimensions of the multiverse. But survival depends on staying one step ahead of the savage Burley Men. The key to the quest is the Skin Map, but Kit has no idea where it leads or what it means. The pieces have been scattered throughout this universe and beyond, and evil forces are also vying for their power. Travel with Mina, a time traveler from seventeenth-century Prague, and discover hidden realms across time and space, from Egyptian sphinxes to Bohemian coffee shops and Stone Age landscapes where universes collide. But beware of those who would use the ley lines for their own sinister purposes. From acclaimed author Stephen R. Lawhead, The Bright Empires series is a thrilling blend of epic treasure hunt, ancient history, alternate realities, cutting-edge physics, philosophy, and mystery. This page-turning adventure is like no other and is sure to captivate fans of fantasy and science fiction alike.

Hilary and Mark Bradley are trapped in a web of suspicion. Last year, accusations of a torrid affair with a student cost Mark his teaching job and made the young couple into outcasts in their remote island town off the Lake Michigan coast. Now another teenage girl is found dead on a deserted beach. . . and once again, Mark faces a hostile town convinced of his guilt. Hilary Bradley is determined to prove that Mark is innocent, but she's on a lonely, dangerous quest. Even when she discovers that the murdered girl was witness to a horrific crime years earlier, the police are certain she's throwing up a smoke screen to protect her husband. Only a quirky detective named Cab Bolton seems willing to believe Hilary's story. Hilary and Cab soon find that people in this community are willing to kill to keep their secrets hidden—and to make sure Mark doesn't get away with murder. And with each shocking revelation, even Hilary begins to wonder whether her husband is truly innocent. Freeman's The Bone House, his first stand-alone thriller since his Stride novels, is a knockout.

THE TIMES '100 BEST SUMMER READS' NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020 'Sublime' Candice Carty-Williams 'An epic in miniature' Tayari Jones 'A banger' Ta-Nehisi Coates 'Generous and big-hearted' Brit Bennett 'A true spell of a book' Ocean Vuong 'A proclamation' R.O. Kwon 'A little masterpiece' Paula Hawkins 'I adored this book' Elizabeth MacNeal 'Pure poetry' Observer 'A sharply focused gem' Sunday Times 'Will remind you why you love reading' Stylist 'Haunting' Guardian 'A wonderful, tragic, inspiring story' Metro 'Prose that sings off the page... Gorgeous' Mail on Sunday 'A nuanced portrait of shifting family relationships' Financial Times 'As seductive as a Prince bop' O, The Oprah Magazine 'Razor-sharp' Vanity Fair 'Dazzling... With urgent, vital insights into questions of class, gender, race, history, queerness and sex' New York Times An unexpected teenage pregnancy brings together two families from different social classes, and exposes the private hopes, disappointments and longings that can bind or divide us. From the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming. Brooklyn, 2001. It is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress - the very same dress that was sewn for a different wearer, Melody's mother, for a celebration that ultimately never took place. Unfurling the history of Melody's family - from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to post 9/11 New York - Red at the Bone explores sexual desire, identity, class, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, as it looks at the ways in which young people must so often make fateful decisions about their lives before they have even begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be. *** ONE OF THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR FOR: New York Times; Washington Post; Time; USA Today; O, The Oprah Magazine; Elle; Good Housekeeping; Esquire; NPR; New York Public Library; Library Journal; Kirkus; BookRiot; She Reads; The Undefeated ***

A modern serial killer - hunting an ancient secret. A woman is left to die as the rebuilt Globe theatre burns. Another woman is drowned like Ophelia, skirts swirling in the water. A professor has his throat slashed open on the steps of Washington's Capitol building. A deadly serial killer is on the loose, modelling his murders on Shakespeare's plays. But why is he killing? And how can he be stopped? A gripping, shocking page turner, The Shakespeare Secret masterfully combines modern murder and startling true revelations from the life of Shakespeare. It has been acclaimed as one of the most compulsively readable thrillers of recent years.

Ron Barton is everybody's All-American. A former small town hero turned college baseball star and Rhodes Scholar, he is the atypical high-pofile physician. Barton's expertise takes him to the Deep South's medical Mecca of Birmingham, Alabama where he excels in the operating room as quickly as he did on the red clay diamonds for Auburn University. Philip Lucci is a rising star in the lucrative field of rehabilitative sports medicine. A former gas station attendant and brick mason turned entrepreneur; he is as much of an anomaly as Dr. Barton. Lucci's laser-like vision to create the McDonald's of worldwide rehabilitative care is as powerful as his insatiable drive for wealth, fame and social rank. Like Barton, he too is a product of the Deep South; but the similarities end there. Lucci is the archetype Machiavellian dictator bent on success. Barton is the consummate professional seeking self-actualization through innovation and heightened care. Unbeknownst, they are on a collision course that will rock Birmingham rehabilitative medicine and ultimately, Wall Street, to their collective cores. A star as bright as Barton's cannot go unnoticed by Lucci's all-discerning focus. Lucci makes him an offer he seemingly cannot refuse--to be a part of his budding rehab empire--at more than double his current salary in an office as ostentatious as his potential benefactor. But refuse Barton does, as he is not in the least impressed by money, or Lucci's phony veneer. Unaccustomed to rebuke, Lucci is incensed by Barton; and as a result, he endeavors to ruin him--as fitting payback. Amanda Lucci, Philip's second wife, is a former Miss Alabama. Bored with the Earthly comforts lavished upon her by her overbearing, compromised husband, she retreats to the high-end escape world of polo, where she meets and falls in love with Dr. Ron Barton, whom she hopelesssly admires for his rugged looks and purposeful existence. Lucci's bodyguards and surveillance team soon learn of the affair and inform their boss. It is just the edge he needs to ruin his recalcitrant detractor. Having already grown tired of Amanda's continued rebuffs, Lucci now has the perfect vengeance plan firmly in place. While Barton is weakened, he is not defeated. He vows revenge. Working through his trusted colleagues he learns of a chink in Lucci's armor. Barton discovers that as Lucci's success grew, so did his competitors, shrinking an already competitive patient pool. To maintain Street expectations, Lucci has resorted to cooking the books. Barton devises his own plan to leak this information to the FBI and raze Lucci's precariously shaky house of cards. But Lucci's resourcefulness proves to be perplexing. Barton again finds himself in the crosshairs--and he is not alone, as his colleagues are now in danger of succumbing to Lucci's growing, fear-fueled malice. As the plot unfolds, it takes the reader on a tortuous, unforgettable courtroom ride. Lucci, the reinvented televangelist catering to a majority black congregation, is first found innnocent of securities fraud as a result of shameless jury pool tainting. However, in the end, Lucci lands predictably in Federal prison; but his long-time dream of building a world-class digital rehabilitative hospital continues nevertheless, albeit with the tweaking of its new standard-bearer, Dr. Ron Barton. Professional Bone is a fast-paced, romantic action thriller that seeks to draw semblance to the ongoing impacts that corporate greed, fraud and indifferent citizenship have had on American free market capitalism.

The plays of Leopold Szor focus on the effects of the Holocaust on those who lived through it. In his words, "survival confers no automatic nobility" and his fascination with the randomness of survival is prevalent throughout his work. Leo's plays, set both in wartime Poland and post-war Europe and America, explore the ways in which both oppressors and oppressed managed to survive the nightmare of war and the effect it had on their psyches. His characters live in a world of constant conflict: romance and pragmatism, fear and greed, ruthlessness and altruism, and the ghosts haunting those who made it out alive. In his forward, Szor says survival "bestows an obligation to speak out until the last breath" and it is in the spirit of this obligation that these plays were written. Leopold Szor was born in 1921 in Lwow, Poland. He spent his boyhood years in Cracow and then moved to Warsaw to attend university, but was interrupted on the first day of classes by the German invasion of Poland and forced to flee eastward. He returned to Lwow and attended art school during the Russian Occupation. After the Nazis invaded Leo was sent to the notorious Janowska concentration camp. He miraculously escaped, and after a daring flight into Russia he participated in the liberation of Poland as part of the re-formed Polish army. After the war Leo immigrated to the United States, where he has lived for the past 60 years. He has a son, Daniel, who lives in London and three grandchildren: Henry, Alex and Emily. Leo lives in New York City with his long-time companion Tove.