Pastor Matthew Schofield loves his books, his writing, and his small Oklahoma congregation. His life is studious and predictable, just the way he likes it. And then he meets Hana Howard and her son, Isaac, who are anything but quiet, anything but predictable, and his world is forever changed.

The Love is a book about Soborno Isaac Bari, a four-year-old Muslim child who launched a campaign to create a world without terrorism. The book is divided into two parts: (1) Soborno’s fight with Imams to change their perception on non-Muslims and (2) his fights with Muslim Americans to denounce terrorism and be patriotic. Millions of people joined his campaign across the world—especially people in Bangladesh where two young Muslim students, Sadiyan Lima (Dhaka University) and Marjia Farzana (Jahangirnagar University), led the movement on behalf of their respective universities. It inspired many people, including Zahid Hossain and Safir Biplob and his son, to stand against the terror of the Islamic State. Zahid published Soborno’s biography, while Safir and his son went to 64,000 villages in Bangladesh posting 64,000 posters. Meanwhile, Uday Bengali made a documentary, I Love Christmas, which created an anti-terrorism movement around Bangladesh that is based on the philosophy of Soborno.

Experience love and healing in these Amish tales Loving Isaac by Rebecca Kertz Back in his Amish community, Isaac Lapp works to rebuild his tattered reputation. His one saving grace is childhood pal Ellen Mast. But even though Ellen’s kindness and beauty are helping him become more confident each day, the lure of the non-Amish world beckons. Isaac must make a choice: a life beyond Happiness, Pennsylvania…or the woman who might just become his forever home. A Groom for Greta by Anna Schmidt When Greta Goodloe’s longtime sweetheart ends their engagement, she decides to take comfort in matchmaking her quiet schoolmarm sister with handsome newcomer Luke Starns. Yet the more she tries to throw them together, the more Luke fascinates her. And Luke can’t help but be charmed by Greta’s warm smile. Does he dare to stray from the sensible choice and take a chance on happiness?

From pre-First World War Warsaw to the New York of the 1930s, Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer traces the early years of his life in this autobiographical trilogy. In A Little Boy in Search of God, he remembers his bookish boyhood as the son of an Orthodox rabbi, equally absorbed in science, philosophy and cabbala. Later, the pursuit of women came to obsess him almost as much as the pursuit of knowledge, and in A Young Man in Search of Love he chronicles the intricacies of his first love affairs. When he emigrated to the United States from Poland on the eve of the Second World War loneliness and depression overwhelmed him, and he relives those dark years in Lost in America. From beginning to end, Love and Exile sheds new light on Singer's own life and the fictional lives mirrored in it.

This classic collection explores the varieties of wisdom gained with age and especially those that teach us how to love, as "in love the young are just beginners and the art of loving matures with age and experience". Tales of curious marriages and divorce mingle with psychic experiences and curses, acts of bravery and loneliness, love and hatred.

Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology demonstrates that Isaac's eschatology is an original synthesis based on ideas garnered from a distinctively Syriac cultural milieu. Jason Scully investigates six sources relevant to the study of Isaac's Syriac source material and cultural heritage. These include ideas adapted from Syriac authors like Ephrem, John the Solitary, and Narsai, but also adapted from the Syriac versions of texts originally written in Greek, like Evagrius's Gnostic Chapters, Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology, and the Pseudo-Macarian homilies. Isaac's eschatological synthesis of this material is a sophisticated discourse on the psychological transformation that occurs when the mind has an experience of God. It begins with the premise that asceticism was part of God's original plan for creation. Isaac says that God created human beings with infantile knowledge and that God intended from the beginning for Adam and Eve to leave the Garden of Eden. Once outside the garden, human beings would have to pursue mature knowledge through bodily asceticism. Although perfect knowledge is promised in the future world, Isaac also believes that human beings can experience a proleptic taste of this future perfection. Isaac employs the concepts of wonder and astonishment in order to explain how an ecstatic experience of the future world is possible within the material structures of this world. According to Isaac, astonishment describes the moment when a person arrives at the threshold of eschatological perfection but is still unable to comprehend the heavenly mysteries, while wonder describes spiritual comprehension of heavenly knowledge through the intervention of divine grace.

“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek. The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.

The author uses sketches, vignettes, lists, and diaries to describe his life as a single gay man in New York, from his childhood to his many messy relationships.

** 'SO VIVID AND REAL, IT BROUGHT A THOUSAND MEMORIES RUSHING BACK' - Russell T Davies ** ** 'AN INSTANT QUEER CLASSIC' - Jon Ransom, author of The Gallopers ** Set in London across a single, life-altering summer, Isaac explores masculinity and queerness in the digital age and offers a fresh take on desire and intimacy, adolescent obsession and dangerous first love. After inexperienced seventeen-year-old Isaac loses his virginity through a dating app - a disappointing yet addictive experience - he spends his final months before university escaping into a dizzying new world of casual sex with forgettable men. This all changes when he meets twenty-eight-year-old Harrison at a party. Isaac is immediately infatuated by the handsome, charismatic artist, but while they grow closer, his sense of self becomes increasingly hazy. Harrison's demands shift constantly, and after Isaac tries everything to prove his worthiness, he must take a hard look at his ideas about love, sex and men, and his relationship with himself. A powerful coming-of-age story for our times, Isaac is perfect for fans of Outline Of My Lover by Douglas Martin, What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell and 100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell. ‘Fast-paced, raw and emotionally intelligent; brilliant on the vulnerability inherent in so many first relationships’ - Daily Mail ‘The gay dating scenes crackle with energy’ - Financial Times ‘Garner captures the complexities of coming of age as a young, queer person...Isaac’s journey is every queer reader’s journey delivered with wit, honesty and tenderness’ - Attitude 'Truly impressive: funny, melancholic and acutely real. Isaac takes me back to my own adolescence in London... bracing and uncensorious' - James Cahill, author of Tiepolo Blue 'A richly textured, tender and unflinching coming-of-age story about sex and sexuality, relationships and power, and the psychic toll of first love. Immensely readable' - Lara Williams, author of Supper Club 'Garner's titular character encapsulates all the wide-eyed wonderment and boundless bruising of a queer awakening. Isaac will have you smiling and screaming in equal measure' - Andrés N. Ordorica, author of How We Named the Stars 'A beautifully crafted and clear-sighted exploration of a young man making sense of contemporary gay life' - Ben Fergusson, author of An Honest Man 'Compulsively readable, Isaac is both an entertaining bildungsroman and a hyper-real snapshot of contemporary gay life' - Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men 'Garner writes like a queer, twenty-first century Richard Yates: honest, uncompromising, fearless, and completely engrossing' - Alex Pheby, author of Playthings 'So carefully written, sexually candid but full of warmth and longing, populated by relatable, believable, flesh-and-blood characters. Deeply satisfying in its elegance and tenderness' - Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy 'Isaac deals with the contemporary landscape of gay male experience... It covers sex, obsession and self-loathing, but is also sweet, tender and domestic' - Paul Bench 'A frank and tender portrayal of young queer identity, interrogating masculinity, family and the body through vividly sensual language' - Kerry Andrew, author of We Are Together Because 'Isaac thinks sensitively about masculinity, its potential for softness, beauty, and brutality. Scenes from this novel have lingered in my mind for months' - Lily Lindon, author of Double Booked This novel contains depictions of sex and domestic violence.