For Sure and Certain
FREE
She knits, cans jam, and lives in the city. He’s an Amish college student, breaking the rules. They’re so right, it’s wrong.
Marigold, a recent high school graduate with a shady past, is looking to redefine herself. She doesn’t know what she wants exactly, but college isn’t it.
When she meets Abel, an Amish guy on Rumspringa, his ‘running around’ time, she doesn’t plan on falling for someone wearing a straw hat and suspenders. But she can’t help it, Abel is the breath of fresh air she’s been waiting for.
Abel, who’s moved to the city for a summer program at Jamestown, never imagined Marigold would be drawn to the life he was trying so hard to avoid. His family expects him to take over the family farm; college parties and dorm life don’t quite fit in with their plans for him.
The Coffee Girl
FREE
Ever wished for something you thought you could never have?
So has Brenna…
On the eve of her thirtieth birthday, Brenna Smith has a few goals in mind:
* Introduce herself to the hunky construction guy she runs into every morning at the coffee shop.
* Slap the smug smirk off the face of her detestable boss right before she quits.
* Open a bistro.
* Find the man who haunts her dreams.
Handsome and charming Brock McCrae owns a successful construction company and enjoys time spent with friends. However, he still has a few items on his to-do list:
*Find a place to call home.
*Get a dog.
*Work up the courage to ask the quirky woman he knows only as the Coffee Girl out on a date.
Will the two of them connect over more than a cup of java?
Dutch Curridge (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 1)
FREE
When Alvis Curridge isn’t holding down a stool at Peechie Keen’s Bar & Kanteen, he busies himself trying to keep things in line around Cowtown – an old habit from his days with the Fort Worth Sheriff’s Department. Sometimes this means tangling with his former boss, or with Ruthie Nell, the spunky reporter for the Fort Worth Press. Things get especially tangled when a baby shows up in a gift-wrapped box at his doorstep. Alas, this is no Moses story. The baby is dead, its young father missing.
Part To Kill a Mockingbird and part Ugetsu Monogatari, Bryant’s Dutch Curridge combines hard boiled crime and mystery with a good old fashioned ghost story as Dutch, who knows a great deal about the ways of the world, learns a little about himself and how he fits into “the scheme of things.”
The Chef’s Mail Order Bride: A Sweet Western Historical Romance (Wild West Frontier Brides Book 1)
FREE
All Sadie had ever known, or ever wanted to know, was being a baker. She’d been raised to bake in her parents’ bakery, and after their deaths, she had planned to carry on the family tradition. Devastated to find out she was losing her family’s business, she needed something to do to support herself. When she received a letter from her twin sister’s husband in Arizona Territory, suggesting she come out to be the bride of his best friend who was opening a restaurant, it seemed like the perfect solution to her problems.
Tripp had gone to the best culinary school in the country, and he knew exactly how to create the perfect meal. He spent hours and hours coming up with just the right menu for his restaurant, only to be told he couldn’t get a loan for it unless he married. When his best friend came up with the solution of sending for his baker sister-in-law, it only made sense.
No Such Thing As Werewolves: Deathless Book 1
FREE
A pyramid predating all known cultures appears without warning. Its discovery throws into question everything we know about the origins of mankind.
Inside lies incredible technology, proof of a culture far more advanced than our own. Something dark lurks within, eager to resume a war as old as mankind. When it is unleashed it heralds the end of our species’ reign.
A plague of werewolves spreads across the world. A sunspot larger than anything in recorded history begins to grow. Yet both pale in comparison to the true threat, the evil the werewolves were created to fight.
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Toccata Obbligato ~ Serenading Kyra (Out of the Box)
FREE
Todd O’Malley has been called many things, from filthy mouthed jerk to legendary Rock God. With his outlandish cocky demeanor – tatted up and pierced, compared in looks to Adam Levine – his constant use of the F-bomb, and the seductive gyrations he performs for the ladies on stage, affirm he is a man every woman craves. But there is only one woman who is able to capture his heart, Kyra Edwards.
That chance meeting at a little coffee shop in Evanston began their journey of compromise, pain, dedication and love.
From the night he took her virginity to Todd’s past sex-capades and consequences threatening their relationship, will Kyra be able to deal with it?
Silver Sparrow
Regularly $14.95, Today $1.99
With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the two teenage girls caught in the middle.
Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s two families—the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode. This is the third stunning novel from an author deemed “one of the most important writers of her generation” (the Atlanta Journal Constitution).
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving: A Novel
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The weekend of my sister’s sixteenth birthday, she took a road trip with some friends down to Lucerne Valley in the Mojave Desert. For two weeks prior, the trip was a source of debate around our dinner table. My old man reasoned that since she was a responsible kid, got good grades, fed her pets, and honored her curfew, she ought to be allowed to take the trip. My mother reasoned that it was a bad idea. She didn’t trust the other kids. They were a scraggly bunch.
My sister took the trip. She never came home. She was killed in a freak car accident the weekend she turned sixteen years old. The incident, the specifics of which have never been explained satisfactorily by anyone, all but exploded my family. My parents divorced after twenty-five years of marriage. I lost what amounted to my primary caregiver. My oldest brother was deeply depressed for two years afterward and was really never the same in some fundamental way.
The Transcriptionist: A Novel
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Once, there were many transcriptionists at the Record, a behemoth New York City newspaper, but new technology has put most of them out of work. So now Lena, the last transcriptionist, sits alone in a room–a human conduit, silently turning reporters’ recorded stories into print–until the day she encounters a story so shocking that it shatters the reverie that has become her life.
This exquisite novel, written by an author who spent more than a decade as a transcriptionist at theNew York Times, asks probing questions about journalism and ethics, about the decline of the newspaper and the failure of language. It is also the story of a woman’s effort to establish her place in an increasingly alien and alienating world.
The High Divide: A Novel
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In 1886, Gretta Pope wakes up one morning to discover that her husband is gone. Ulysses Pope has left his family behind on the far edge of Minnesota’s western prairie, with only the briefest of notes and no explanation for why he left or where he’s heading. It doesn’t take long for Gretta’s young sons, Eli and Danny, to set off after him, leaving Gretta no choice but to search for the boys and their father in hopes of bringing them all home.
Enger’s breathtaking portrait of the vast plains landscape is matched by the rich expanse of his characters’ emotional terrain, as pivotal historical events–the bloody turmoil of expansionism, the near total demise of the bison herds, and the subjugation of the Plains Indians–blend seamlessly with the intimate story of a family’s sacrifice and devotion.
The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World’s Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books
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A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East, and by the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex.
Journalist Matti Friedman’s true-life detective story traces how this precious manuscript was smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Israel and how and why many of its most sacred and valuable pages went missing. It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book. What it reveals are uncomfortable truths about greed, state cover-ups, and the fascinating role of historical treasures in creating a national identity.
If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska
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Tiny Haines, Alaska, is ninety miles north of Juneau, accessible mainly by water or air—and only when the weather is good. There’s no traffic light and no mail delivery; people can vanish without a trace and funerals are a community affair. Heather Lende posts both the obituaries and the social column for her local newspaper. If anyone knows the going-on in this close-knit town—from births to weddings to funerals—she does.
Whether contemplating the mysterious death of eccentric Speedy Joe, who wore nothing but a red union suit and a hat he never took off, not even for a haircut; researching the details of a one-legged lady gold miner’s adventurous life; worrying about her son’s first goat-hunting expedition; observing the awe-inspiring Chilkat Bald Eagle Festival; or ice skating in the shadow of glacier-studded mountains, Lende’s warmhearted style brings us inside her small-town life.
The Year My Mother Came Back
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Thirty years after her death, Alice Eve Cohen’s mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: the year her youngest daughter needs a harrowing surgery, her eldest daughter decides to reunite with her birth mother, and Alice herself receives a daunting diagnosis. As it turns out, it’s entirely possible for the people we’ve lost to come back to us when we need them the most.
Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, Alice approaches it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood and allow herself to be a daughter once more in order to take care of her own girls. Understanding and forgiving her mother’s parenting transgressions leads her to accept her own and to realize that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be a good mother.
Bobcat and Other Stories
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Rebecca Lee, one of our most gifted and original short story writers, guides readers into a range of landscapes, both foreign and domestic, crafting stories as rich as novels. A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor’s shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is hired to find a wife for the one true soulmate she’s ever found. In all, Rebecca Lee traverses the terrain of infidelity, obligation, sacrifice, jealousy, and yet finally, optimism. Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it’s impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they’d expected.
The Rental Sister: A Novel
Regularly $14.95, Today $1.99
Thomas Tessler has cloistered himself in his bedroom and shut out the world for the past three years. His wife, Silke, lives right in the next room, but Thomas no longer shares his life with her, leaving his hideout only occasionally, in the wee hours of the night, to pick up food at the grocery store around the corner from their Manhattan apartment. Unable to cope with a devastating loss, Thomas has become isolated and withdrawn. He is hikikomori.
Desperate for one last chance to salvage their life together, Silke hires Megumi, a young Japanese immigrant attuned to the hikikomori phenomenon, to lure Thomas back into the world. Fleeing from her own shattering experience, Megumi has buried her pain in a fast life spent in nightclubs with nameless men. Now she will try to help Thomas and Silke as a “rental sister,” as they are known in Japan. At first Thomas remains steadfast and sequestered, but as he grows to trust Megumi, a deepening and sensual relationship unfolds.
The Wisdom of Perversity: A Novel
Regularly $25.95, Today $1.99
Brian and Jeff were best friends, growing up together in New York City in the late 1960s. Then something happened that drove a wedge between them, ending both their friendship and their childhood, something that neither ever spoke about . . . at least until their shared secret resurfaced some forty years later, forcing them to reunite and, along with Jeff’s cousin Julie, to face the consequences of their years of silence.
In The Wisdom of Perversity, Rafael Yglesias, the critically acclaimed, bestselling novelist and screenwriter and the author of A Happy Marriage, winner of the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, andFearless, the basis for the cult film by the same name, has crafted a novel that tells the stories of three childhood friends who join together as adults to acknowledge the ways in which their lives were altered by the actions of a predator, a predator who now, many years later, has been exposed by more recent victims yet is on the verge of escaping punishment–thanks to his wealth and influence.
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The Late Starters Orchestra
Regularly $18.95, Today $1.99
In a cluttered room in an abandoned coat factory in lower Manhattan, a group of musicians comes together each week to make music. Some are old, some are young, all have come late to music or come back to it after a long absence. This is the Late Starters Orchestra–the bona fide amateur string orchestra where Ari Goldman pursues his lifelong dream of playing the cello.
Goldman hadn’t seriously picked up his cello in twenty-five years, but the Late Starters (its motto, If you think you can play, you can) seemed just the right orchestra for this music lover whose busy life had always gotten in the way of its pursuit.
A Curable Romantic
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Breakfast at Sally’s: One Homeless Man’s Inspirational Journey
Regularly $9.99, Today $1.99
One day, Richard LeMieux had a happy marriage, a palatial home, and took $40,000 Greek vacations. The next, he was living out of a van with only his dog, Willow, for company. This astonishingly frank memoir tells the story of one man’s resilience in the face of economic disaster. Penniless, a failed suicide, estranged from his family, and living “the vehicular lifestyle” in Washington state, LeMieux chronicles his journey from the Salvation Army kitchens to his days with “C”—a philosopher in a homeless man’s clothing—to his run-ins with Pastor Bob and other characters he meets on the streets. Along the way, he finds time to haunt public libraries and discover his desire to write.
LeMieux’s quiet determination and his almost pious willingness to live with his situation are only a part of this politically and socially charged memoir. The real story of an all-too-common American condition, this is a heartfelt and stirring read.
The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America
Regularly $13.99, Today $1.99
The Big Book of Casseroles: 250 Recipes for Serious Comfort Food
Regularly $15.99, Today $1.99
Bubbling cheese, golden bread crumbs, tender vegetables, and succulent meats – what’s not to like about casseroles?
You will find no canned soups in Maryana Vollstedt’s The Big Book of Casseroles. You will find 250 ways to simplify your weekly meal planning. The properly deployed casserole is economical of both time and money. Anyone living on a family budget–with a family–but eating according to a take-out lifestyle is going to love this book.Jambalaya is a casserole. So is Coq au Vin. So is classic Hungarian Goulash. But let us not forget Turkey Tetrazzine. Or maybe we should forget. Maybe it’s the Turkey Tetrazzines of the world made with leftover dried-out Thanksgiving turkey coming at us after the days of turkey soups and turkey sandwiches and turkey salads that have given the word casserole the kind of odor we look for behind the refrigerator. While Vollstedt’s version of Turkey Tetrazzine doesn’t ask for a can of cream of mushroom soup, and while it is made from fresh ingredients, the result is still going to be the same.
… See the rest of today’s Book Picks here on page 2Page 2
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