More than an unusual love story, Jonas and the Mountain offers startling insights into the nature of reality. An enlightened eastern mystic. A western psychic who knows everything. And a broken man who falls in love with them both at a holy, magnetic mountain in India. This is a journey into the heart of it all.Jonas has been living a half-life since he lost his marriage, his college English teaching position, and his best friend all at once. Then he hears a voice in his head, and strange poems start to just come to him. These events lead him away from his home in Vancouver, Canada, to the holy mountain of Arunachala in India, where Jonas meets the American guru D whose master was the sage of nondualism, Ramana Maharshi. From D he learns about silence and waking up from the dream. After Jonas's retreat with D ends, he meets an oddly familiar woman and discovers a connection with her that explains the voice and poems and opens up yet another reality. Anamika's unique metaphysical teachings differ from D's-multiple dimensions, partner selves, creativity-and she offers simple expressive arts exercises to bring them home to the characters in the novel and to you, the reader. Jonas seeks to reconcile D's and Anamika's knowledge to find what is true with a capital "T," as he struggles to resolve the pain in his past and the surprising ways it appears in his present.You are invited to journey with Jonas and find your own answers.

An exceptional debut novel about a young Muslim war orphan whose family is killed in a military operation gone wrong, and the American soldier to whom his fate, and survival, is bound. Jonas is fifteen when his family is killed during an errant U.S. military operation in an unnamed Muslim country. With the help of an international relief organization, he is sent to America, where he struggles to assimilate-foster family, school, a first love. Eventually, he tells a court-mandated counselor and therapist about a U.S. soldier, Christopher Henderson, responsible for saving his life on the tragic night in question. Christopher's mother, Rose, has dedicated her life to finding out what really happened to her son, who disappeared after the raid in which Jonas' village was destroyed. When Jonas meets Rose, a shocking and painful secret gradually surfaces from the past, and builds to a shattering conclusion that haunts long after the final page. Told in spare, evocative prose, The Book of Jonas is about memory, about the terrible choices made during war, and about what happens when foreign disaster appears at our own doorstep. It is a rare and virtuosic novel from an exciting new writer to watch.

The Giver, the 1994 Newbery Medal winner, has become one of the most influential novels of our time. The haunting story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark, complex secrets behind his fragile community. This movie tie-in edition features cover art from the movie and exclusive Q&A with members of the cast, including Taylor Swift, Brenton Thwaites and Cameron Monaghan.

This diary of a monastic life is “a continuation of The Seven Storey Mountain . . . Astonishing” (Commonweal). Chronicling six years of Thomas Merton’s life in a Trappist monastery, The Sign of Jonas takes us through his day-to-day experiences at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, where he lived in silence and prayer for much of his life. Concluding with the account of Merton’s ordination as a priest, this diary documents his growing acceptance of his vocation—and the greater meaning he found within his private world of contemplation. “This book is made unmistakably real and almost, at times, unbearably poignant by the fact that the exuberance of youth so often wells up through it with rapture, impatience, and even bluster.” —TheNew York Times “A stirring book—the most readable and on the whole, most illuminating of the author’s writings.” —Catholic World

Terry's dad wrote an autobiography of his life, primarily because he was a quiet man, viewed as strange or a nonconformist by family and friends, and he wanted to set the record straight on who he was, who he is, what he believes, and the journeys he took along the way to cope with problems and live his life. Terry's dad and she had a fraught relationship, similar to the one he had with Terry's mother. However, his behavior, as she perceived it, was distant and unloving. Through his writing, he invited his daughter to know him, and she did. However, she felt there was more to the story, and as her eyes were opened to the facets of him, she came to better understand how their relationship influenced her development as a person. His story is delightful, almost Huckleberry Finn in some aspects, and Terry strove to add background and context to the many adventures he had in his life. She "dialogues" with her dad along the way and fills in the reader on her perspective of him and the family relationship and dynamics. Prepare to be absorbed in a man's life through the entire twentieth century and enjoy reading about his life as much as Terry did.

Trappist monk and best-selling author, Thomas Merton battled constantly within himself as he attempted to reconcile two seemingly incompatible roles in life. As a devout Catholic, he took vows of silence and stability, longing for the security and closure of the monastic life. But as a writer he felt compelled to seek friendships in literary circles and success in the secular world. In Thomas Merton's Art of Denial, David D. Cooper traces Merton's attempts to reach an accommodation with himself, to find a way in which "the silence of the monk could live compatibly with the racket of the writer." From the roots of this painful division in the unsettled early years of Merton's life, to the turmoil of his directionless early adult years in which he first attempted to write, he was besieged with self-doubts. Turning to life in a monastery in Kentucky in 1941, Merton believed he would find the solitude and peace lacking in the quotidian world. But, as Merton once wrote, "An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck." Merton felt compelled to choose between life as either a less than perfect priest or a less prolific writer. Discovering in his middle years that the ideal monastic life he had envisioned was an impossibility, Merton turned his energies to abolishing war. It was in this pursuit that he finally succeeded in fusing the two sides of his life, converting his frustrated idealism into a radical humanism placed in the service of world peace. Here is a portrait of a man torn between the influence of the twentieth century and the serenity of the religious ideal, a man who used his own personal crises to guide his youthful ideals to a higher purpose.