NOT ALL WOMEN ARE SUBMISSIVE… Ava Archer had everything a woman could ever desire. She was beautiful, rich, sociable, and free to do whatever she wanted between the sheets. Her job was easier than breathing when she worked as an assistant for her old man. Ava got everything she wanted and was used to getting her own way… Until she met Nathaniel Brooks. Order and control were all that Nate knew when he was a managing partner of the prestigious law firm Archer and Brooks. When his business partner takes ill, he must leave his comfortable Manhattan branch and tend to the firm in London. He didn’t foresee this change being problematic but then again… He hadn’t yet met his fiery and tenacious assistant, Ava Archer. In a battle for dominance, Ms. Archer would need to fall in line if she were to work under Mr. Brooks but there was just one problem: not all women are submissive. When the clock strikes five, both would soon realise the difficulty in keeping things business as usual behind office doors… Will Nate be able to maintain control over his heart? Will Ava lose everything when she learns that for a lawyer, deception is their art? ​​​​​​​ ____________________ BY DEBUT ROMANCE AUTHOR HOLLY DIXON ★★★★★ "You'll gasp, you'll moan, you may even shed a tear or two like I did!" ★★★★★ “If you're looking for a spicy romance with hilarity for pages and pages, this is the book for you!” ★★★★★ "Read at your own caution it will start an obsession. You have been warned!" ★★★★★ "Illicit Affairs is fabulous! This is not an exaggeration. This book is SO good!" ★★★★★ "You'll laugh from chapter one, bite your lip by chapter thirty and cry when it's all over!" ★★★★★ "Sexy, sultry, heart-racing, unique and exciting!"

In the midst of sun-soaked days and moonlit nights, 'Illicit Affairs' spins a tale of tangled hearts and whispered promises. After having spent the summer with June, Ben finds himself caught in an unexpected dance of emotions, where his loyalty to Liz collides with temptation and wrong timing. Due to the chaos of crowds, gentle waves, and salt-kissed air, choices are made that will forever alter the course of their lives. Can love truly flourish amongst the twisted threads of hope, and maimed trust?

A Today Show Summer Reads Pick A Washington Post Book of the Year "We think we know the ones we love." So Pearlie Cook begins her indirect, and devastating exploration of the mystery at the heart of every relationship--how we can ever truly know another person. It is 1953 and Pearlie, a dutiful young housewife, finds herself living in the Sunset District in San Francisco, caring not only for her husband's fragile health, but also for her son, who is afflicted with polio. Then, one Saturday morning, a stranger appears on her doorstep, and everything changes. Lyrical, and surprising, The Story of a Marriage is, in the words of Khaled Housseini, "a book about love, and it is a marvel to watch Greer probe the mysteries of love to such devastating effect."

How many mistakes does it take to ruin you? How many lies can a person tell before you see them for who they are?Mia Johnson blew me away in more ways than I could count. Her body. Her taste. Her need. However, her poisonous past started to affect me, and I knew what that meant-what needed to be done. Still, I was never a man who listened to reason.This time I should have.My name is Wesley Black, and this story may be twisted, but this woman is mine.

For the commitment-averse women in these eleven sublime laugh-out-loud stories, falling in love is never easy and always inconvenient. “Single, Carefree, Mellow is a lot like the women who populate it: smart and sexy and a little bit ruthless.” —Entertainment Weekly “Something like Cheever mixed with Ephron.” —The New York Times Book Review Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living above her garage will hear her kids swearing than that he will find out she’s sleeping with her running partner. The women grapple with love amidst everything from unwelcome houseguests to disastrous birthday parties as Katherine Heiny spins a debut that is superbly accomplished and endlessly entertaining.

A groundbreaking investigation of how illicit commerce is changing the world by transforming economies, reshaping politics, and capturing governments.In this fascinating and comprehensive examination of the underside of globalization, Moises Naím illuminates the struggle between traffickers and the hamstrung bureaucracies trying to control them. From illegal migrants to drugs to weapons to laundered money to counterfeit goods, the black market produces enormous profits that are reinvested to create new businesses, enable terrorists, and even to take over governments. Naím reveals the inner workings of these amazingly efficient international organizations and shows why it is so hard — and so necessary to contain them. Riveting and deeply informed, Illicit will change how you see the world around you.

"A fresh look at infidelity, broadening the focus from the havoc it wreaks within a committed relationship to consider also why people do it, what it means to them, and why breaking up is the expected response to duplicity — but not necessarily the wisest one.” — LA Review of Books From iconic couples’ therapist and bestselling author of Mating in Captivity comes a provocative and controversial look at infidelity with practical, honest, and empathetic advice for how to move beyond it. An affair: it can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness, their very identity. And yet, this extremely common human experience is so poorly understood. What are we to make of this time-honored taboo—universally forbidden yet universally practiced? Why do people cheat—even those in happy marriages? Why does an affair hurt so much? When we say infidelity, what exactly do we mean? Do our romantic expectations of marriage set us up for betrayal? Is there such a thing as an affair-proof marriage? Is it possible to love more than one person at once? Can an affair ever help a marriage? Perel weaves real-life case stories with incisive psychological and cultural analysis in this fast-paced and compelling book. For the past ten years, Perel has traveled the globe and worked with hundreds of couples who have grappled with infidelity. Betrayal hurts, she writes, but it can be healed. An affair can even be the doorway to a new marriage—with the same person. With the right approach, couples can grow and learn from these tumultuous experiences, together or apart. Affairs, she argues, have a lot to teach us about modern relationships—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They offer a unique window into our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment. Through examining illicit love from multiple angles, Perel invites readers into an honest, enlightened, and entertaining exploration of modern marriage in its many variations. Fiercely intelligent, The State of Affairs provides a daring framework for understanding the intricacies of love and desire. As Perel observes, “Love is messy; infidelity more so. But it is also a window, like no other, into the crevices of the human heart.”

From the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less comes Andrew Sean Greer's extraordinarily haunting love story The Confessions of Max Tivoli, told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwards. A Today Show Book Club Pick We are each the love of someone's life. So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max's father declares him a "nisse," a creature of Danish myth, as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child. The story is told in three acts. First, young Max falls in love with a neighborhood girl, Alice, who ages as normally as any of us. Max, of course, does not; as a young man, he has an older man's body. But his curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him. She takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love. Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max's life and confessions question the very nature of time, of appearance and reality, and of love itself. A beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli reveals the world through the eyes of a "monster," a being who confounds the very certainties by which we live and in doing so embodies in extremis what it means to be human.

An “excellent” ethnography that “reveal[s] the global implications of the US morality on international policies and migrant workers” (Cristina Firpo, International Review of Modern Sociology). In 2004, the US State Department declared Filipina hostesses in Japan the largest group of sex trafficked persons in the world. Since receiving this global attention, the number of hostesses entering Japan has dropped by nearly 90 percent. To some, this might suggest a victory for the global anti-trafficking campaign, but Rhacel Parreñas counters that this drastic decline—which stripped thousands of migrants of their livelihoods—is a setback. Parreñas worked alongside hostesses in a working-class club in Tokyo’s red-light district, serving drinks and entertaining her customers. While the common assumption has been that these hostess bars are hotbeds of sexual trafficking, Parreñas quickly discovered a different world of working migrant women, there by choice, and, most importantly, where none were coerced into prostitution. Illicit Flirtations calls into question the US policy to broadly label these women as sex trafficked. It highlights how in imposing top-down legal constraints to solve the perceived problems—including laws that push dependence on migrant brokers and measures that criminalize undocumented migrants—many women become more vulnerable to exploitation, not less. This book gives a long overdue look into the real world of those labeled as trafficked. “A highly readable and informative book.” —Ko-lin Chin, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books “A nuanced portrayal. . . . Scholars and policy-makers should take note.” —Viviana A. Zelizer, Princeton University, author of Purchase of Intimacy and Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy “An extraordinary book.” —Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of A Sociology of Globalization