Ingrid Lundström, the daughter of a wealthy Swedish banker, has been a global roamer since she left school. An iconic blond, she resembles Agnetha Fältskog of Abba fame. These attributes dominate her existence, especially when she moves to Papua New Guinea, to work. Because of her connection to wealth, she becomes the target of criminals. Because of her appearance, she attracts special interest at every turn. When aspiring teacher Michael Mannion hears about Ingrid's fate at the hands of kidnappers, he travels to Papua New Guinea to track her down and attempt a rescue. However, he encounters many surprises. What he doesn't know is that he's as much the problem as the solution. They say love conquers all, but in a country where it's hard to separate fact from fiction, the serious from the lighthearted, and good guys from bad guys, love may not be enough. For Ingrid and Michael, love is their path to salvation but this path takes them on a different and sometimes unpredictable adventure.

The Red Sheep is a story about Jessica Grant and the challenges faced by families as they deal with aging, mortality, religion, and relationships. Jessica, an only child, was immersed in a stable and supportive family but it did not hide the fact she was different. As such, she saw the world differently. As a child she questioned her being. As a teenager she set her mother in search of answers. As an adult she learned to accept life was what she made of it. Jessica's journey was filled with childhood joy at having special grandparents. When Nan and Pop passed away, it was her youthful logic that helped her cope with their loss. With Nan and Pop's opposing views of an afterlife deeply embedded in her outlook, Jessica explored her background with conviction. The answers she found highlighted how unique she was. The story will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make you question the world around you. It will cause you to marvel at the extraordinary lives led by everyday ordinary people.

Stories about My School Life is a book about schools and the people who made them what they were. In its own way it tells the recent history of schools. It also paints a picture of what it is like to work in them. Anyone who has been to school will enjoy the funny, often incredible stories in this book. Whether a snowball fight, a microwaved pig's head; or a frog in the toilet; whether in outback Queensland, England or Papua New Guinea; from the classroom to the cricket pitch, the stories are sure to bring back memories of your own school life.

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century. Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

A cloth bag containing eight copies of the title.

"Inspirational historical romance"--Spine.

Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, was an actual baron living in 18th-century Hanover famous for entertaining his guests with outrageously-embellished tales of his wartime exploits—so much so that his nickname in German is Lügenbaron, or “Baron of Lies.” When Rudolph Eric Raspe, a writer and scientist living in England, heard of the Baron’s tales, he wrote his own versions centered around a fictional Baron Munchausen. While the real Baron wasn’t amused to have his name attached to a silly character famous for his bald-faced lies, Raspe’s tales became hugely popular, reprinted for hundreds of years and illustrated just as many times. These very short tales were originally intended as contemporary satire, but their outrageous silliness is still entertaining today.

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.