Vikram Seth'S Captivating Book Is The Story Of A Century And Of A Love Affair Across A Racial Divide Shanti Behari Seth Was Born On The Eighth Day Of The Eighth Month In The Eighth Year Of The Twentieth Century; He Died Two Years Before Its Close. He Was Brought Up In India In The Late Years Of The Raj, And Was Sent By His Family In The 1930S To Berlin Though He Could Not Speak A Word Of German To Study Medicine And Dentistry. It Was Here, Before He Migrated To Britain, That Shanti'S Path First Crossed That Of His Future Wife. Henny Gerda Caro Was Also Born In 1908, In Berlin, To A Jewish Family, Cultured, Patriotic And Intensely German. When The Family Decided To Have Shanti As A Lodger, Henny S First Reaction Was, 'Don'T Take The Black Man!' But A Friendship Flowered, And When Henny Fled Hitler'S Germany For England, Just One Month Before The War Broke Out, She Was Met At Victoria Station By The Only Person She Knew In The Country: Shanti. Vikram Seth, Their Great-Nephew From India, Arrived In This Childless Couple'S Life As A Teenage Student. Now He Has Woven Together The Astonishing Story Of Shanti And Henny, And The Result Is An Extraordinary Tapestry Of India, The Third Reich And The Second World War, Auschwitz And The Holocaust, Israel And Palestine, Postwar Germany And 1970S Britain. Two Lives Is Both A History Of A Violent Country Seen Through The Eyes Of Two Survivors As Well As An Intimate Portrait Of Their Friendship, Marriage And Abiding Yet Complex Love. Part Biography, Part Memoir, Part Meditation On Our Times, This Is The True Tale Of Two Remarkable Lives A Masterful Telling From One Of Our Greatest Living Writers. Click Here To See Vikram Seth'S Microsite

In Sit Down to Rise Up, mindfulness teacher and activist Shelly Tygielski shares her transformative journey of radical self-care and mutual aid, illuminating how these practices can ignite powerful social change and personal empowerment. Through stories and practical guidance, she demonstrates the profound impact of showing up for yourself and your community. This book is a blueprint for anyone seeking to cultivate resilience, compassion, and a sense of purpose in a fractured world. Discover how small acts of kindness can create ripple effects that lead to broader movements for justice and equity and how, despite the challenges we face, we should never lose hope or lose faith in humanity. Join Shelly in exploring how every human life matters and how together, we can rise up to build a better future.

Set in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, "An Obscure Man" is the story of Nathanaël—innocent, open to experience—born like Everyman upon the stream of life. In "A Lovely Morning," Nathanaël's young son joins a touring company of Jacobean actors. "Anna, soror . . . ," the final tale, is an account of illicit passion in the baroque world of Naples. "An Obscure Man swarms with life. This intricately researched, imaginative, beautifully written tale of a young man's brief life in the mid-17th century is entirely engrossing."—Leona Weiss, San Francisco Chronicle "In these three stories, [Yourcenar] succeeds in making the essences of these past lives a part of the reader's future through the sheer intensity of their portrayal."—Margaret Ezell, Houston Chronicle

Greek missionary Costas Macris was a man of unusual faith and vision, which God used to profoundly impact both cannibals in Indonesia and modern inhabitants in Greece.

William Trevor's Last Stories is forthcoming from Viking. In Reading Turgenev, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, an Irish country girl is trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man, but finds release through secret meetings with a man who shares her passion for Russian novels. My House in Umbra tells of Emily Delahunty, a writer of romantic novels, who helps survivors of a bomb attack on a train to convalesce, inventing colorful pasts for her patients. Two novels, two women who retreat further into the realm of the imagination until the boundaries between what is real and what is not become blurred.

A young woman's search for home and belonging This luminous debut follows a young woman from her childhood in Vietnam to her life in the United States – and her necessary return to her homeland. As a child, isolated from the world in a secretive military encampment with her distant mother, she turns for affection to a sympathetic soldier and to the only other girl in the camp, forming two friendships that will shape the rest of her life. As a young adult in New York, cut off from her native country and haunted by the scars of her youth, she is still in search of a home. She falls in love with a married woman who is the image of her childhood friend, and follows strangers because they remind her of her soldier. When tragedy arises, she must return to Vietnam to confront the memories of her youth – and recover her identity. An inspiring meditation on love, loss, motherhood, and the presence of a past that never dies, If I Had Two Lives explores the ancient question: do we value the people in our lives because of who they are, or because of what we need them to be?

Two lives. Two loves. One impossible choice. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club Pick One Day in December . . . “I read The Two Lives of Lydia Bird in a single sitting. What a beautiful, emotional gift Josie Silver has given us.”—Jodi Picoult Written with Josie Silver’s trademark warmth and wit, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird is a powerful and thrilling love story about the what-ifs that arise at life’s crossroads, and what happens when one woman is given a miraculous chance to answer them. Lydia and Freddie. Freddie and Lydia. They’d been together for more than a decade and Lydia thought their love was indestructible. But she was wrong. On Lydia’s twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie died in a car accident. So now it’s just Lydia, and all she wants is to hide indoors and sob until her eyes fall out. But Lydia knows that Freddie would want her to try to live fully, happily, even without him. So, enlisting the help of his best friend, Jonah, and her sister, Elle, she takes her first tentative steps into the world, open to life—and perhaps even love—again. But then something inexplicable happens that gives her another chance at her old life with Freddie. A life where none of the tragic events of the past few months have happened. Lydia is pulled again and again through the doorway to her past, living two lives, impossibly, at once. But there’s an emotional toll to returning to a world where Freddie, alive, still owns her heart. Because there’s someone in her new life, her real life, who wants her to stay.

How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master "whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness" and "thin, plain, tense, sour" Alice B. Toklas, the "worker bee" who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate "marriage." As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. "The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties," she writes. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. "Even the most hermetic of [Stein's] writings are works of submerged autobiography," Malcolm writes. "The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning-you need a crowbar for that-but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion." Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein "solves the koan of autobiography," or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of "magisterial disorder," Malcolm is stunningly perceptive. Praise for the author: "[Janet Malcolm] is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight."-David Lehman, Boston Globe "Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography."-Christopher Benfey

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Ms. Magazine, The Root, Popsugar, Bustle, and many more! “An utterly absorbing and dazzling novel about the stories we tell to stay alive and the secrets we keep to protect ourselves.” — Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times Bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee In 1960s Memphis, a young mother finds refuge in a boardinghouse where family encompasses more than just blood and hidden truths can bury you or set you free. Sara King has nothing, save for her secrets and the baby in her belly, as she boards the bus to Memphis, hoping to outrun her past in Chicago. She is welcomed with open arms by Mama Sugar, a kindly matriarch and owner of the popular boardinghouse The Scarlet Poplar. Like many cities in early 1960s America, Memphis is still segregated, but change is in the air. News spreads of the Freedom Riders. Across the country, people like Martin Luther King Jr. are leading the fight for equal rights. Black literature and music provide the stories and soundtrack for these turbulent and hopeful times, and Sara finds herself drawn in by conversations of education, politics and a brighter tomorrow with Jonas, a local schoolteacher. Romance blooms between them, but secrets from Mama Sugar’s past threaten their newfound happiness and lead Sara to make decisions that will reshape the rest of their lives. With a charismatic cast of characters, The Two Lives of Sara is an emotional and unforgettable story of hope, the limitations of resilience and unexpected love.

Sent to prison at age 19 on a minor drug offense, a 10-to-20 year sentence, Susan Marie Lefevre chose to escape the life she'd been dealt and begin a new one. She spent the next thirty-two years living the life she'd always planned, all the while carrying the secret of her past. When her two lives collided, the results were played out in the courtrooms and news media.