You have a terrific idea. You know it is so powerful that it could change a life, a market, or even the world. There's just one problem: others can't, or don't, see it... yet.

Twenty-three year old Ali is desperately trying to escape her New England Yankee background and a Marine Corps Colonel father who has never recovered from WWII. A bildungs-roman of American counterculture in the 1970's as the naive but adventurous heroine searches for purpose and love.

Beautifully designed and gorgeously illustrated, this immersive, puzzle-like exploration of the history and psychology of mazes and labyrinths evokes the spirit of Choose Your Own Adventure, the textual inventiveness of Tom Stoppard, and the philosophical spirit of Jorge Luis Borges. Labyrinths are as old as humanity, the proving grounds of heroes, the paths of pilgrims, symbols of spiritual rebirth and pleasure gardens for pure entertainment. Henry Eliot leads us on a twisting journey through the world of mazes, real and imagined, unraveling our ancient, abiding relationship with them and exploring why they continue to fascinate us, from Kafka to Kubrick to the myth of the Minotaur and a quest to solve the disappearance of the legendary Maze King. Are you ready to step inside?

After the loss of her daughter in a freak accident, Maya Lange opens an adoption agency to place baby girls from China with American families and discovers the painful and courageous journeys of both adoptive parents and birth mothers.

When a girl is adopted from a Chinese orphanage, everything she knew about family, best friends, and sisterhood must change. Wen has spent the first eleven years of her life at an orphanage in rural China, and the only person she would call family is her best friend, Shu Ling. When Wen is adopted by an American couple, she struggles to adjust to every part of her new life: having access to all the food and clothes she could want, going to school, being someone's daughter. But the hardest part of all is knowing that Shu Ling remains back at the orphanage, alone. Wen knows that her best friend deserves a family and a future, too. But finding a home for Shu Ling isn't easy, and time is running out . . .

In the Orient there is a belief that the gods, using an invisible red thread, connect every person with their destined 'other'. In Japanese legend, the thread is thought to be tied around the little finger of everyone on earth. According to this myth, the thread can travel everywhere, regardless of time, place and circumstances, until finding its other end. It is also said that the magical thread may be twisted or tangled but never broken. This book follows the myth and consists of four parts representing the four seasons: SPRING - the birth; SUMMER - the flourishing; AUTUMN - the experience; WINTER - the knowledge. On each illustration the invisible thread is hidden, weaving through nature, culture and the myths of traditional and contemporary Japanese life. You, the reader, needs to find and transform the invisible thread into the magical red one, while colouring the rest of the world it passes through using your imagination, and follow the red thread to find its destiny. Includes 6 pages of characters, icons, traditions and curiosities of Japanese arts and crafts.

In the wake of a tragedy and fueled by guilt from a secret she's kept for years, a woman discovers how delicate the thread that binds family is in this powerful novel by Lyn Liao Butler. Two days before Tam and Tony Kwan receive their letter of acceptance for the son they are adopting from China, Tony and his estranged cousin Mia are killed unexpectedly in an accident. A shell-shocked Tam learns she is named the guardian to Mia’s five-year-old daughter, Angela. With no other family around, Tam has no choice but to agree to take in the girl she hasn’t seen since the child was an infant. Overwhelmed by her life suddenly being upended, Tam must also decide if she will complete the adoption on her own and bring home the son waiting for her in a Chinese orphanage. But when a long-concealed secret comes to light just as she and Angela start to bond, their fragile family is threatened. As Tam begins to unravel the events of Tony and Mia’s past in China, she discovers the true meaning of love and the threads that bind her to the family she is fated to have.

A king and queen should be full of joy and contentment, but they both feel a strange pain that worsens every day. Then a peddler's magic spectacles reveal a red thread pulling at each of their hearts. The king and queen know they must follow the thread.

'Charlotte Higgins's Red Thread is a masterwork' Ali Smith A thrillingly original, labyrinthine journey through myth, art, literature, history, archaeology and memoir. The tale of how the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur, finding his way out of the labyrinth using Ariadne's ball of red thread, is one of the most intriguing, suggestive and persistent of all myths, and the labyrinth - the beautiful, confounding and terrifying building created for the half-man, half-bull monster - is one of the foundational symbols of human ingenuity and artistry. Charlotte Higgins, author of the Baillie Gifford-shortlisted Under Another Sky, tracks the origins of the story of the labyrinth in the poems of Homer, Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, and with them builds an ingenious edifice of her own. Along the way, she traces the labyrinthine ideas of writers from Dante and Borges to George Eliot and Conan Doyle, and of artists from Titian and Velázquez to Picasso and Eva Hesse. Her intricately constructed narrative asks what it is to be lost, what it is to find one's way, and what it is to travel the confusing and circuitous path of a lived life. Red Thread is, above all, a winding and unpredictable route through the byways of the author's imagination - one that leads the reader on a strange and intriguing journey, full of unexpected connections and surprising pleasures.

A frank and engaging memoir, Following the Red Thread is a mother's full answer to her daughter's childhood question: 'why did you adopt me?' Making sense of her early experiences as both the preparation and her motivation to adopt, Kerr draws on the Chinese concept of the red thread to detail her long march towards China and the adoption of her much loved daughter. Along the way, she encounters many different 'Chinas' and comes to love the infinite variety that is the People's Republic on the cusp of the third millennium. Kerr's deep desire to adopt is intertwined with her journey back to faith. From an outright rejection of Christianity in her teens, she rediscovers her faith and realises a childhood promise to serve God overseas. Ultimately, in seeking out her daughter, she finds herself.