A Southwest Book of the Year "In this masterful performance, Bryn Chancellor explores the loss around which an entire community has calcified with humanity and wisdom. Chancellor digs deep in these pages, unearthing broken hearts, secrets, betrayals, passion and—most impressively—grace. What a joy to find a book that is both propulsive and perfectly composed."—Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest An award-winning writer makes her debut with this mesmerizing page-turner in the spirit of Everything I Never Told You and Olive Kitteridge. Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore’s longtime residents fear the bones may belong to Jess Winters, the teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some eighteen years earlier, an unsolved mystery that has soaked into the porous rock of the town and haunted it ever since. In the days it takes the authorities to make an identification, the residents rekindle stories, rumors, and recollections both painful and poignant as they revisit Jess’s troubled history. In resurrecting the past, the people of Sycamore will find clarity, unexpected possibility, and a way forward for their lives. Skillfully interweaving multiple points of view, Bryn Chancellor knowingly maps the bloodlines of a community and the indelible characters at its heart. Evocative and atmospheric, Sycamore is a coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a moving exploration of the elemental forces that drive human nature—desire, loneliness, grief, love, forgiveness, and hope—as witnessed through the inhabitants of one small Arizona town.

The prophet Amos, a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees, had a parallel, and more challenging, calling as a shepherd of human souls. So too does Garret Keizer, an Episcopalian minister to the community of Island Pond in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. This profoundly contemporary book displays not only Keizer's knowledge of life's small practicalities (winding the church clock, shopping for groceries), but also his insights about faith and the mysterious ways of God. With an eye attuned to both the pleasures and foibles that make life on earth so rich, he presents a refreshing and often hilarious account of the hands-on work needed to maintain a parish and sustain its spirit. He is a man who believes that God's intentions, if seldom apparent, are inevitably compassionate and compelling.

A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity. When you turn the music off, and suddenly you feel an unbearable sadness, that means turn the music back on, right? When you still feel the sadness, even with the music, that means there's something wrong with this music. Sometimes I feel like sex without context isn't sex at all. And sometimes I feel like sex without context is what sex should always be.--The Freezer Door The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life. Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.

For fans of BookTok #sadbooks comes an emotional love story that will break your heart and mend it at the same time. Time is a luxury we don't all have... Emery Matterson's life has been broken for a while. First, she lost her twin sister—the other half of her heart—to an incurable autoimmune disease. Then her father left. Now Emery has been diagnosed with the same disease that killed her sister, and her mother is falling apart. Unable to live under the same roof anymore, the only option for Emery is to move in with a father she hasn't seen in ten years and try to start over. Enter Kaiden Monroe, the brooding athlete who has baggage of his own. Kaiden makes Emery feel normal. Hated. Cared for. Loathed. And...loved. Somewhere along the way, Emery finds solace in the guy with the sad eyes. But everything happens in stages. And nothing good ever lasts. From fan-favorite author B. Celeste comes a raw, real, and unforgettable story of love and loss between two young people grappling with the harsh reality of invisible disease.

These “flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve” as the author explores nature, love, and mourning in a landscape all her own (Publishers Weekly). This collection of meditative poems by Kathy Fagan takes the sycamore as its inspiration—and delivers precise, luminous insights on lost love, nature, and the process of recovery. “It is the season of separation & falling / Away,” Fagan writes. And so—like the abundance of summer diminishing to winter, and like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree’s expansion—the speaker of these poems documents a painful loss and tenuous rebirth, which take shape against a forested landscape. Black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them. Cottonwood sends out feverish signals of pollen. And everywhere are sycamores, informed by Fagan’s scientific and mythological research. Spellbinding and ambitious, Sycamore is an important new work from a writer whose poems “gleam like pearls or slowly burning stones” (Philip Levine). A 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist

Queen Victoria's court knows Charlotte Sycamore as the mild-mannered sixteen-year-old daughter of Her Majesty's royal surgeon. Yet Charlotte has a penchant for inventing new gadgets, and most nights she sneaks out to sword fight with her best friends, Peter and Jillian. When the three are mauled by what look like rabid dogs, Charlotte is forced to hide both her friends and her own injury. As her symptoms worsen and people are murdered across London, she embarks on a race against time to find the antidote and ultimately save the queen's life. Full of action, a luxe royal court, engineered beasts, and a good dose of humor, this steampunk novel is a masterful blend of science fiction, fantasy, and alternative history.

“Sycamore kicks mainstream literature in the teeth.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's exhilarating novel is about struggling to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco—battling roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, the cops, $100 bills, chronic pain, the gay vote, vegan restaurants and incest, with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions and sleeping pills. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly unveils a gender-bending queer world where nothing flows smoothly, except for those sudden moments when everything becomes lighter or brighter or easier to imagine. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel Pulling Taffy and the editor of the anthology Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift and MaximumRocknRoll.

The Power of Faith, Hope, and Relationships On September 28, 2016, school counselor Molly Hudgens was in her office at Sycamore Middle School when a fourteen-year-old armed with a semiautomatic handgun and an additional magazine of ammunition came to her in the counseling department. His plan was to kill people on campus. He told Hudgens she was the only person who could talk him out of it. After ninety minutes of talking with the young man, and ultimately praying on her knees with him, he relinquished the gun with no shots fired and no lives lost. In this memoir, Hudgens shares the story of that day and the thirty-nine years and 364 days leading up to it that prepared her for the best and worst day of her life. Her story is one of triumph over adversity and hope found in the bleakest of moments. As Hudgens walks readers through the incident, she shares how her faith, rapport with the student, and a strong school community guided her efforts and provided a positive outcome that day. How do you have compassion for a student sitting in your office with a loaded gun and the desire to kill? Saving Sycamore is the remarkable story of a woman whose compassion was stronger than the homicidal rage in the heart of a desperate student.--Peter Langman, PhD, author of School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators; director of Research and School Safety Training, Drift Net Securities Saving Sycamore illustrates Molly's leadership, compassion, faith, and vulnerability when the members of her school community needed her most on that fateful day and in the aftermath. This is a book about a faith journey.--Frank DeAngelis, principal of Columbine High School, 1996-2014; author of They Call Me "Mr. De" The Story of Columbine's Heart, Resilience, and Recovery Saving Sycamore is a must-read to learn how God worked to truly save lives at Sycamore Middle School.--Major General William B. Raines, Jr., USA (retired); Charles H. Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center Executive Board

The human heart is restless and searching. We are longing for happiness and peace. Even though many people speak about "the death of God", the question of meaning and religion doesn't seem to go away.This booklet looks at the adventure of spiritual life and the search for God. It uses stories and examples from history and from the bible to show how religion can be such an important part of everyday life. It explains some of the reasons why people continue to believe in God and why faith can bring us meaning and hope.