In 2006, Richard Gwyn was given a year to live. He had lost nine years of his life to vagrancy and alcoholism in the Mediterranean, principally in Spain and Crete. This memoir is an account of those years; redemption via friendship, imagination, intellect, love and fatherhood; recovery and a life-saving liver graft. This book has also won the prize for creative Non-fiction, in the Wales Book of the Year 2012 Awards.

From “a born storyteller,” a nineteenth-century British family saga about a woman reunited with her husband, who goes in search of her estranged daughter (Times & Citizen). 1885. Ex-convict Emma Grady has returned to her hometown of Blackburn and been reunited with her lover, Marlow. Now married, with a beautiful home, loving husband and wonderful son, she is still haunted by the past, unable to forget the cruelty of her uncle Caleb Crowther, who ignored her desperate pleas to save her and her tragic first-born. A feared local justice, Crowther curses his niece’s return and sets out to destroy her anew, whilst also hounding Molly, her lost daughter. Born to a life of crime and poverty and deserted by her husband, Molly tries desperately to keep her three children fed and clothed. When Emma starts looking for her, Molly wrongly fears that it is Crowther searching her out, and she and her children run away to become vagabonds. Contending with hunger, exhaustion and the unwelcome attentions of the men who are drawn to Molly’s dark beauty, her life is at times almost unbearable. But Molly has inherited Emma’s indomitable spirit . . .

In September of 1937, Eagle Scout Tom Larson put a packsack on his back and set out to see the world. After two years at the University of Minnesota, he hitchhiked westward from his hometown of Aitkin, Minnesota. Eight months later as a seaman on a west coast oil tanker, he'd saved $250 dollars. After riding on freight cars and hitchhiking, he arrived in New York City. Luckily he was able to work passage on a Danish freighter to Antwerp, Belgium. Then on his bicycle "Napoleon" he traveled through Belgium and Holland and thence through England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Across the North Sea to Norway he cycled through Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, the three Baltic states into Poland and Nazi Germany. In Paris he met his friend, Eagle Scout Edwin Woolverton, of Albert Lea, Minnesota. After wild and hilarious adventures in France and Belgium, they crossed the Mediterranean to Algeria. They took refuge in the youth hostel in Sidi Bou Said, Tunesia. From there their vagabond travels took them to Sardinia, Italy, Switzerland, and back into Germany. Back in Paris they mingled with refugees before making one last journey into West German bordertowns and Holland. War threatened at any day. Luckily in late March of 1939, they worked their way home on a Norwegian freighter through a great North Atlantic storm to New York, just four months before the Nazis invaded Poland and began WWII. On December 7th, 1941, Tom ended up in the Battle of Pearl Harbor. Edwin Woolverton served on numerous merchant ships during the war. They survived on a shoe-string budget, good luck, oatmeal and Scout hospitality.

A mother-daughter duo reclaims and redefines soul food by mining the traditions of four generations of black women and creating 80 healthy recipes to help everyone live longer and stronger. NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER • “Soul Food Love has preserved our traditions but reinvented how they’re prepared. Its focus on health is a godsend.”—Viola Davis “This beautifully written compendium is literary history, cookbook, family album, motherwit, daughter-grace, and the gospel truth. I’ll be cooking from this book for years to come.”—Elizabeth Alexander, poet and professor After bestselling author Alice Randall penned an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Black Women and Fat,” chronicling her quest to be “the last fat black woman” in her family, she turned to her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, for help. Together they overhauled the way they cook and eat, translating recipes and traditions handed down by generations of black women into easy, affordable, and healthful—yet still indulgent—dishes, such as Peanut Chicken Stew, Red Bean and Brown Rice Creole Salad, Fiery Green Beans, and Sinless Sweet Potato Pie. Soul Food Love relates the authors’ fascinating family history, which mirrors that of much of black America in the twentieth century, explores the often-fraught relationship African American women have had with food, and forges a powerful new way forward that honors their cultural and culinary heritage.