'I learned about conflict from my parents.' So begins Christina McKenna's haunting memoir of her lonely early life. Recounting scenes from her childhood in Ulster, she paints a memorable and poignant picture of violence and oppression with her brutal father and protective mother, whose retalliation to her husband's meaness came in the form of a secret yellow dress. This is a rite-of-passage account of two generations of Irish women, told with great humour and compassion. On the one hand is the writer; on the other the heroic mother who showed her love as best she could. McKenna concludes that our past, no matter how painful, need not keep us bound - once we choose love over hate. That choice, she suggests, will set us free.

JOHN is brought up on an isolated farm near York, spends his spare time birdwatching, lives with an unsympathetic stepfather and loving mother, and attends Hull University as the government pays his expenses. He worries about serious relationships with girls and has no idea of what career to follow. His experience so far is as a farm hand and a hospital porter. A letter he finds at home confirms his biological father is alive but has no intention of helping him. On Bonfire Night 1965 (Guy Fawkes Night), during his final undergraduate year, he meets a fellow student, JEAN-LOUISE, and a romantic relationship develops. In many ways she is different from John; she is a town girl, brought up by loving parents, is an only child, has opposing politics and knows what she wants to be – a fashion buyer for Marks & Spencer. The obstacle is her mother is ill with muscular dystrophy and she must help take care of her parents. She surprises John by encouraging his birdwatching. John joins Ford of Britain as a graduate trainee and after an uncertain start, is placed in industrial relations and decides to study for a graduate degree with the Institute of Personnel Management. He also discovers more about his real father. What happens to the couple during the subsequent 10 years as they navigate their careers, have to deal with events that take place in Britain during the period and manage personal issues at home, are the subjects of this book. There is panic buying during the 1974, 3-day working week, the affects on home life of Britain's entry into the Common Market, annual inflation driven above 25 percent in part because of trade union militancy, and many other national incidents. A unique feature of the novel is the use of bird species to illustrate human behavior and character. At the end of each chapter there is an illustration of the featured bird from that chapter to provide a summary of the bird's appearance and habitat in case the reader is interested. The novel blends British history, ornithology, success at work, discrimination against women and the challenges of home life into a single story.

A versatile missive written from the intersections of gender, disability, trauma, and survival. “Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.” She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead. These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.” Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.

The heartbreaking, never-before-told story of Hollywood icon Natalie Wood’s glamorous life, sudden death, and lasting legacy, written by her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner. More Than Love is a memoir of loss, grief, and coming-of-age by a daughter of Hollywood royalty. Natasha Gregson Wagner’s mother, Natalie Wood, was a child actress who became a legendary movie star, the dark-haired beauty of Splendor in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, and West Side Story. She and Natasha’s stepfather, the actor Robert Wagner, were a Hollywood it-couple twice over, first in the 1950s, and then again when they remarried in the 70s. But Natalie’s sudden death by drowning off Catalina Island at the age of forty-three devastated her family, made her stepfather a person of interest, and turned a vibrant wife, mother, and actress into a tragic figure. The events of that weekend have long been a mystery, and despite the rumors, scandalous media coverage, and accusations of wrongdoing, there has never been an account of how the tragedy was experienced by her daughter. For the first time Natasha addresses the questions surrounding that night to clear her beloved stepfather’s name. More Than Love begins on the morning after her mother’s death in November 1981 when eleven-year-old Natasha hears the news on the radio that her mother’s body has been found off the coast of Catalina after her parents had spent the weekend on the family boat, The Splendour. From this profound and shattering loss, Natasha shares her memories of her earliest bonds with her mother; her warm, loving, and slightly chaotic childhood as the daughter of two stars; the lost and confused years of her adolescence; and her halting attempts to move forward as a young woman. Beautifully told, More Than Love is an emotionally powerful tale of a daughter coming to terms with her grief, as well as a riveting portrait of a famous mother and a vanished Hollywood.

WOW! Last Journey of the Ark is an incredible read. Mr. Gainer has done a spendid job of engaging the reader in an intriguing story line involving a fascinating subject...The Ark of the Covenant. You will enjoy this colorful journey. Great Job!! REVIEW By DL Moody- President of Arlington Baptist Your book is absolutely wonderful. I loved every minute of it! I laughed. I cried. I learned alot. Set up, climax and follow through of the storyline are all excellent. I would make an excellent screenplay as well (something to thing about in the future. REVIEW by Sarajoy Porter--Editor Now available at authorhouse.com--Last Journey of the Ark (288 pages), a compelling action-adventure with a hint of romance, inspired by contemporay events that tell how the Ark of the Covenant went back to Israel in modern times. The heroine is a determined woman reporter from New York City who stumbles into love while entangled in dangerous and complex Israeli security issues. Ultimately she witnesses the return of the Ark of the Covenant to Israel in 1991. So why didn't the world hear about these events? Indeed, bits and pieces of the real story have leaked out over the years. Perhaps you recall a whisper of an announcement on world news in May 1991 that the Israel Security Service--the Mossad--had quietly transported 14,314 Ethiopian Jews back to Israel at the height of the Civil War in Ethiopia. Why would Israel believe that these modern Ethiopian Jews are truly descendants of the tribe of Dan? Why would Israel risk men and airplanes against a backdrop of civil war in Ethiopia to fly these Jews to Israel? Why would Israelis take 14,000 poor people to their tiny country and pay millions of dollars to Ethiopia for that privilege? Why would the Israelis name the operation after the very King of Israel who first placed the Ark in the second temple? Read this book to find out.

"A marvelous showcase for these Indiana treasures." --Sara Sanderson, The Indianapolis News

Some memories of childhood are impossible to forget. For author Grace Thomson, the memories of her experiences of growing up during World War II in Scotland have lasted a lifetime. When the Luftwaffe bombed her small town, she and her family were forced to endure hardships daily. Grace writes of her parents' struggles to feed and clothe their children when they were faced with rationing the most basic necessities of life. There were years of hunger when she ate tree leaves to fill her empty belly. We follow Grace and her brothers through their school days when a pencil was a luxury and a slate to write on a necessity. Life equaled loss, and the family suffered the loss of a family member in the war with stoic strength. She watched her mother become so depressed that she contemplated suicide as the only way to escape her misery. Grace endured sexual harassment in dead-end jobs; eventually, she met her future husband and escaped to Canada to an unknown future.

A memoir from the award-winning author of My Lesbian Husband, Barrie Jean Borich’s Body Geographic turns personal history into an inspired reflection on the points where place and person intersect, where running away meets running toward, and where dislocation means finding oneself. One coordinate of Borich’s story is Chicago, the prototypical Great Lakes port city built by immigrants like her great-grandfather Big Petar, and the other is her own port of immigration, Minneapolis, the combined skylines of these two cities tattooed on Borich’s own back. Between Chicago and Minneapolis Borich maps her own Midwest, a true heartland in which she measures the distance between the dreams and realities of her own life, her family’s, and her fellow travelers’ in the endless American migration. Covering rough terrain—from the hardships of her immigrant ancestors to the travails of her often-drunk young self, longing to be madly awake in the world, from the changing demographics of midwestern cities to the personal transformations of coming out and living as a lesbian—Body Geographic is cartography of high literary order, plotting routes, real and imagined, and putting an alternate landscape on the map.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations. Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

Eunice Remington lives in Virginia Beach, VA This is her first novel. Spiritual This is the life journey of six sisters raised in the South. It mostly revolves around Ellen, the fifth sister. The sun would come out and the rain would fall. There would be laughter and there would be tears. The six lives are intertwined for eighty years. Cover design by: Elsie W. DeLane W. Barnstable, MA