From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she could hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack Labatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness.

An erotic story of sexual activity, dripping action and even bigger business deals;Keep following the sexiest sales girl in business as she continues to earn her huge bonus by being the best at removing her tight silken blouse.Welcome back to Belinda's world of global pots and pans sales. Things are heating up quite nicely what with potential new promotions and more dalliances with the increasing customer clientele and their acquaintances. Belinda gets the chance to again wear her sexy show jumping outfit giving off good vibrations which enable her to meet a very haute couture contact. An international job always means more travel and Belinda oddly finds herself in another very sticky European situation. It would be impossible to not let her primal feelings show through and have a couple of dog days but as always Belinda does her best. The pace is however intoxicating, as she eventually finds time to assess the first of her Regional Sales Managers. But there is time to relax with the Glee Team as they destroy all the rules of female behaviour whilst grabbing a bit of much needed sand, sun and sea. With New Guinea artefacts and more new customers to satisfy it's all go. Finally it's back to London where Belinda gets an opportunity to assess the second of her Regional Sales Managers as well as the spiral staircase leading from her garage to her laundry room.... what more could you want... well perhaps the cliff hanger of all cliff hangers?

A teenager struggles through physical loss to the start of acceptance in an absorbing, artful novel at once honest and insightful, wrenching and redemptive. (Age 12 and up) On a sunny day in June, at the beach with her mom and brother, fifteen-year-old Jane Arrowood went for a swim. And then everything -- absolutely everything -- changed. Now she’s counting down the days until she returns to school with her fake arm, where she knows kids will whisper, "That’s her -- that’s Shark Girl," as she passes. In the meantime there are only questions: Why did this happen? Why her? What about her art? What about her life? In this striking first novel, Kelly Bingham uses poems, letters, telephone conversations, and newspaper clippings to look unflinchingly at what it’s like to lose part of yourself - and to summon the courage it takes to find yourself again.

Profiles the life and career of the professional ballerina, covering from when she began dance classes at age thirteen in an after-school community center through becoming the only African American soloist dancing with the American Ballet Theatre.