The notes of an old music box connect two girls from very different worlds--Clara, who struggles to survive poverty and violence in a troubled city, and Claire, whose ordinary life is beset by grief--in a place where neither can be sure what's real.

Have you ever woken from a dream feeling it was more real than your world? Could there be someone exactly like you living another life? Claire lives in an ordinary world where everything is whole. But now she feels broken into pieces as her world is suddenly shattered with grief. The silvery notes of her music box help her escape from her pain into a dream world, into Clara's world. Clara's world has always been broken. Her fragmented life revolves around scavenging and swapping objects to survive. She is determined to face the sinister side of her cracked reality to save the only family she has ever known. But the cost may be more than she bargained for. Though Claire and Clara live in different worlds, their paths are set to collide when the people they love most are faced with death. But which world is the dream? Who is the dreamer? Penni Russon has written a spellbinding tale that stretches the imagination about what is possible.

A marriage-in-crisis rekindles its passion in this second chance romance about going the distance to make love last. Freya Bergman has spent a dozen years loving Aiden and never thought they’d find their marriage on the rocks. He’s her partner and best friend, the person she knows she can count on most. Until one day Freya realizes the man she married is nowhere to be found. Now Aiden is quiet and withdrawn, and as the months wear on, the growing distance between them becomes too much to bear. Aiden would spend a dozen lifetimes making his wife happy. But the one thing that will make her happiest is the one thing he’s not sure he can give her: a baby. With the pressure of providing and planning for a family, his anxiety is at an all-time high. They’re drifting apart and he doesn’t know how to change the tide. As if weathering marriage counseling wasn’t enough, Freya and Aiden are thrown together for a Bergman family island getaway. Will this trip help them finally work through their trouble in paradise, or be the final wave that tows them under?

This heartwarming picture book reassures children that a parent’s love never lets go—based on the poignant lyrics of JJ Heller’s beloved lullaby “Hand to Hold.” “May the living light inside you be the compass as you go / May you always know you have my hand to hold.” With delightful illustrations and an engaging rhyme scheme, this book offers the promise of security and love every child’s heart longs to know. From skipping stones and counting stars to climbing trees and telling stories, every moment is wrapped snugly in the certain warmth of a parent’s presence and God’s blessing. With poignancy and joy, this bedtime read captures the unconditional love parents want their children to know but so often fail to express amid the chaos of daily life.

Where women are created for the pleasure of men, beauty is the first duty of every girl. In Louise O'Neill's world of Only Every Yours women are no longer born naturally, girls (called "eves") are raised in Schools and trained in the arts of pleasing men until they come of age. Freida and Isabel are best friends. Now, aged sixteen and in their final year, they expect to be selected as companions--wives to powerful men. All they have to do is ensure they stay in the top ten beautiful girls in their year. The alternatives--life as a concubine, or a chastity (teaching endless generations of girls)--are too horrible to contemplate. But as the intensity of final year takes hold, the pressure to be perfect mounts. Isabel starts to self-destruct, putting her beauty--her only asset--in peril. And then into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride. Freida must fight for her future--even if it means betraying the only friend, the only love, she has ever known.

An indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing, from widely admired writer and teacher Verlyn Klinkenborg. Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, he sets out to help us unlearn that “wisdom”—about genius, about creativity, about writer’s block, topic sentences, and outline—and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression.

THE STORY: The home of the Blackwoods near a Vermont village is a lonely, ominous abode, and Constance, the young mistress of the place, can't go out of the house without being insulted and stoned by the villagers. They have also composed a nasty s

The Ever & Always Duet concludes with Four Love… Holly has never been more scared in her life. She’s hoping that the bad guys attempting to bank off her realize—like she has—that her temporary husband doesn’t care for her as anything more than a way to cash in on his inheritance and amuse his roommates in the process. Even if she makes it out alive, she won’t ever be whole. Not unless Trent, Lorenzo, and Owen suddenly decide that the stakes in the game they were playing are a lot steeper than can be paid for with money. This time, they’re gambling everything on love. Four Love is the conclusion of the Ever & Always Duet, and should be read following Four Money.

They were supposed to be best friends...