Wednesdays Child is about a four-year-old deaf-mute child, Caroline, who gets kidnapped. Fast paced and gripping, the story takes us on the journey of the parents and detectives quest to find the little girl, while also giving us chilling glimpses of Carolines struggle with a ruthless kidnapper. Will they ever find Caroline alive? An ordinary man concerned with share markets and multiplying his wealth transforms himself into the Saint. Why? What made him who he is today? A Random Act of Kindness gives us the answers to these fundamental questions, weaving a beautiful and poignant story on what matters most in this world. Two people who are made for each other take a long time in realizing what was apparent to everyone else. Peter and Samanthas story, Eternal Love is something we can all relate to and understand. Will they finally end up together? Having children can take a toll on parents. But what about having a child diagnosed with a terminal illness? The Day After Tomorrow, however, takes a different perspective and looks at everything from the childs point of view. A short story that is sweet with a funny twist at the very end.

Finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction Long-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Named a Best Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose. A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday’s Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. Even before such moments, everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen. Yiyun Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and her memoir, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and other publications. Taken together, these stories, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.

In three amazing stories childcare worker Shane Dunphy reveals a world of hidden heartbreak and survival against the odds. When Shane meets her, Gillian is starving herself to death and in thrall to a mother more interested in abusing and manipulating her daughter than cherishing and protecting her. Though he tries to help, it seems Shane is just another adult destined to fail Gillian ... For the daughter of disturbed violent parents, Connie is an amazingly well-adjusted A-grade student. But when Shane finally gets behind the facade, he unearths a shattering truth behind her apparent normality ... Cordelia, Victor and Ibar are three loving siblings left with a hopelessly alcoholic neglectful father. It’s a race against time to see if their father can ever become the kind of Dad he wants to be, or if they are destined to be split up and sucked into the childcare merry-go-round ...

As Miriam Martin stood at her father's graveside, she recalled the complex story of her parents' marriage. Her mother's family migrated from the Mid-West in 1887 on the expanded line of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad from Kansas City to San Diego. Miriam's grandfather was looking to find the "golden fruits, the gardens of this sunset land." It was there in San Diego County, on a windy summer day on the beach, that her mother, Suzanna, met her father, Victor. She was 13. He was 20. By the time Suzanna was 14, they had been secretly married. Suzanna still lived at home, meeting Victor on weekends. Miriam couldn't help but smile as she recalled the story she had been told about how the secret was revealed. But she also knew that the happiness her parents had at the beginning was short-lived. Victor, a pharmacist, and his family had the only pharmacy in San Diego, and he was a prominent citizen of the city. Yet all his education and charm could not overcome his alcoholism, and Miriam (called Merry by her beloved father) was caught in the middle of her parents' stormy relationship. Miriam's story unfolds against the backdrop of California's earliest days, when most residents lived a rural life. And when "the town of San Diego reeked of newness, with its crude dirt streets and sparsely placed wooden buildings. Strange trees called palms flanked the roadway." Yet it was growing day by day as Easterners and Mid-Westerners made their way to Southern California's sunny shores.

Wednesday's Child is the winner of the Maine Chapbook Award. It is in its fourth printing. It is taught in many university courses. This is a book about a female growing up, living in, trying to leave her cultural self behind, and then returning to the Franco-American cultural group which exists in the Northeast, and more specifically in Waterville, Maine. The book addresses what has been asked of me to be present to this cultural group of people. As a girl/woman who or how have I been asked to be? What has been asked of me? The book is written from the perspective of a contemporary woman who is also a historical person. The book is also as much about the conditions in which the Franco-American group exists as well as the writing about what it means to be Franco-American and female. This is a book about how we are our historical self while we are in the present. I am more of my past--than I am of the present moment--when it is in the present moment that I now exist. What is, or is not, reflected in my reality and the reality of other Franco-Americans? This book is about the female self and her formation through the many individuals and institutions around her. Through story and cultural filters, the book illustrates family, friends, religion, health, alcoholism, superstitions, art & craft, beliefs, values, song, recipe, story, coming-of-age, generations, motherhood, language, bilingualism, denials, sexuality and what constitutes a cultural individual in a society that will not always allow that person full access or realization to who she is. But she does it anyway.

As many as one in four women have suffered severe neglect or abuse in childhood. This doubles the likelihood of their suffering clinical depression in adult life. Based on twenty years of systematic research,Wednesday's Child examines why neglect and abuse occur and demonstrates how such negative experience in childhood often results in abusive adult relationships, low self-esteem and depression. Drawing on interviews with over 200 women, the authors show vividly what can be learned from the experience of adult survivors of abuse. Most importantly, Wednesday's Child assesses the factors which can reduce the later impact of such experience on both the children of today and the parents of tomorrow.

A dozen of the very best mystery stories from crime-fiction’s maestro, including one brand new Inspector Banks story. Best known — and much admired — for his long-running and bestselling Inspector Banks series, Peter Robinson is also widely and highly praised by mystery mavens for his riveting short stories. Robinson’s versatile talent is on full display in the twelve stories that comprise his latest short story collection, The Price of Love and Other Stories. Spellbinding plots, suspense that grips and won’t let go, utterly unpredictable twists, psychological truths both sweet and scary, characters you’d like to meet (and some you’d hope never to encounter), all set in places that are characters themselves — these are the fundamentals of story and mystery that Robinson plays like the virtuoso he is.

From New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author Peter Robinson comes a suspenseful and frightening tale of the connection between a missing child and the murder of a young man in the sixth book of the critically acclaimed Inspector Banks Mystery Series. A well-dressed couple claim to be social workers responding to abuse allegations and pressure Brenda Scupham into allowing them to take her seven-year-old daughter, Gemma, into protective care. When they fail to return, Brenda realizes her catastrophic mistake, and soon Chief Inspector Alan Banks is on the case. As days pass, Banks and his colleague, Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, begin to lose hope, but then a body is found in the ruins of a nearby lead mine, and the two cases begin to connect in a chilling, horrifying way.

When one places 'Wednesday's Child' under the microscope it plainly reveals that Marcus Green was failing in the American way of life during the early 1970's, and chose to leave the Country of his birth , rather than to continue dwelling in the land which had brought about the demise of the three young black men whom he had known since childhood. Each of them had been drawn into the world of drugs and supposedly easy money , only to discover that all that really awaited them was an early ticket to the graveyard. Marcus choosing to span an ocean could not know what awaited him on the other side of that great expanse of water. Suddenly thrust into a culture as different as chalk is to cheese he had to adapt or perish. In a world where money, education, and social connections are enabled to bring even the most naive person safe harbor and protection, Marcus was bereft in every area. He truly became a child of providence and one dependent on the wind blowing in the right direction. This is as much about the sometimes invisible goodness of God, as it is about the visible kindness and open generosity of the elderly German woman who received him into her home, without an ulterior motive. Further to this tale of wonderment, it is also about innocent love, and how such love can be found with those outside of ones league, or realm of understanding, causing Marcus to challenge his personal strengths and weaknesses with a woman of unusual power, virtually on a daily basis. Also an underlying story of the sophisticated and worldly African American society living in Great Britain during the nineteen seventies, and how Marcus had to strap himself in for the jet set ride of his young life, which he had unexpectedly stumbled upon. Finally losing at love, yet gaining in prosperity and notoriety he is forced to return to the United States, ostensibly to bask in the limelight, but really to meet the true love of his life, and his real destiny as a human being.