In this Christmas novella, a tightly-wound workaholic is getting unwrapped by a handsome stranger… Holly Redding has come home to enjoy the holidays with her family and, hopefully, to escape a case of writer’s block. So when a chance encounter with a sexy local proves to be too much of a heart-racing distraction, she vows to keep her distance. But in a small town like Haven, New Hampshire, it’s hard to avoid Cole Wiley—and their undeniable chemistry. Cole wants Holly the moment she bumps into him. She may act a little icy since their stolen kiss, but he knows how to make her melt. If Cole gets his way, the two of them might be ringing in the New Year—and a new life—together…

Bestselling author Diane Chamberlain delivers a breakout book about a small southern town fifty years ago, and the darkest—and most hopeful—places in the human heart After losing her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and nephew as tenants on a small tobacco farm.  As she struggles with her grandmother’s aging, her sister’s mental illness and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give. When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County’s newest social worker, she doesn’t realize just how much her help is needed.  She quickly becomes emotionally invested in her clients' lives, causing tension with her boss and her new husband.  But as Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm—secrets much darker than she would have guessed.  Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or risk losing the battle against everything she believes is wrong. Set in rural Grace County, North Carolina in a time of state-mandated sterilizations and racial tension, Necessary Lies tells the story of these two young women, seemingly worlds apart, but both haunted by tragedy.  Jane and Ivy are thrown together and must ask themselves: how can you know what you believe is right, when everyone is telling you it’s wrong?

"One of the most celebrated writers of criticism in nineteenth-century Spain, Leopoldo Alas employed his satirical talent to powerful and humorous effect in fiction as well. In His Only Son, Bonifacio Reyes, a romantic flautist by vocation--and a failed clerk and kept husband by necessity--dreams of a novelesque life. Tied to his shrill and sickly wife by her purse strings, he enters timidly into a love affair with Serafina, a seductive second-rate opera singer, encouraged by her manager who mistakes Bonifacio for a potential patron. Meanwhile, Bonifacio's wife experiences a parallel awakening and in the midst of a long-barren marriage, surprises them both with a son--but is it Bonifacio's? In the accompanying novella, Doana Berta, an aged, poor, but well-born woman forfeits her beloved estate in search of a portrait that may be all that remains of the secret love of her life"--

Get your drama on as the girls from the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller, SOUTH BEACH, strut back into the limelight in another sizzling spring break tale of romance, friendship, and crushes gone bad. Two beautiful girls. One sexy city. Endless opportunities for l'amour. When ALEXA ST. LAURENT falls in love, she falls hard. Can she keep her cool after meeting a French guy who's too good to be true and too hard to resist? For HOLLY JACOBSON, being in love with her boyfriend, Tyler, is as natural as breathing. But there's no denying that Alexa's Parisian cousin Pierre takes Holly's breath away.... On a whirlwind rendezvous in Paris, the City of Love, Alexa and Holly are about to discover that everything sounds sexier in French.

Just how weak were the women of the Civil War era? What could they expect beyond marriage and childbirth in an age where infant and maternal mortality was frequent and contraception unknown? Did anyone marry for love? Could a woman divorce? What rights had the unmarried? What expectations the widows? An expert on the period, Antonia Fraser brings to life the many and various women she has encountered in her considerable research: governesses, milkmaids, fishwives, nuns, defenders of castles, courtesans, countesses, witches and widows.

An anthology of poems and illustrations by children and young people living on the Isle of Wight, aged 8-15.The 25 shortlisted and 8 winning entries from the 2014 Anti-Bullying poetry competition based on the theme ‘Let’s Stop Bullying for all’ are collated within this ebook, alongside illustrations from young people on the Isle of Wight.

After a stalker breaks into her home, internet entrepreneur Bee Langston decides Kelly Connolly is the only man who can help her—but seeking help from the former Marine isn’t easy, especially after she made a spectacular fool of herself trying to kiss the sinfully sexy bodyguard. When Kelly spots Bee weaving her way through the Houston nightspot where he’s working security, all those feelings he’s desperately tried to deny for his best friend’s sister come flooding to the surface. He’ll do anything to keep her safe, even if means getting up close and personal with the one woman he simply can’t have. Soon, Bee’s stalker isn’t his only problem. His gambling addict father is tangled in a mess of debts to two of Houston’s toughest loan sharks. With the family gym on the line, there’s only one way for Kelly to make everything right. He agrees to fight for the Albanian mob in an underground bare-knuckle fighting tournament. But winning the tournament and saving his family’s legacy comes at a high price—one that just might cost Bee her life.

“The thought . . . called up the flavors of an elaborate and bold cuisine, bent on making the flavors’ highest notes vibrate, juxtaposing them in modulations, in chords, and especially in dissonances that would assert themselves as an incomparable experience.” — From *Under the Jaguar Sun* These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses. Taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico’s fiery chilies and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, “Under the Jaguar Sun.” In “A King Listens,” a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant’s thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. “The Name, the Nose” drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them. Mordant and deliciously offbeat, this trio of tales is a treat from a master of short fiction. “[Calvino is] a learned, daring, ingeniously gifted magus . . . Under the Jaguar Sun . . . fuses fable with neuron . . . The reader is likely to salivate.” — Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review

Jeanette Winterson's novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is now often required reading in contemporary fiction. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life's work to find happiness. It's a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the Universe as Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past that Jeanette thought she'd written over and repainted rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging--for love, identity, home, and a mother.

John Reddy Heart came to Willowsville, New York, driving a salmon-colored Cadillac Bel Air and sitting on three Las Vegas phone books; he was eleven years old. From that day on, as John, his seductive mother, addled grandfather, and younger siblings settled into one of the town's most beautiful homes, John Reddy Heart would become legendary as a rebel, a heartthrob, and an outlaw. In this uproarious epic novel from one of our most gifted contemporary storytellers, the ballad of John Reddy Heart -- his rise, fall, and second ascent into the realm of myth -- is sung by a chorus of Willowsville voices who find in him their savior, scapegoat, dream lover, and confessor. Broke Heart Blues may be the most entertaining novel yet from Joyce Carol Oates: razor-sharp satire that holds a mirror up to America's obsession with celebrity.

Chilling real-life accounts of witches, from medieval Europe through colonial America From a manual for witch hunters written by King James himself in 1597, to court documents from the Salem witch trials of 1692, to newspaper coverage of a woman stoned to death on the streets of Philadelphia while the Continental Congress met, The Penguin Book of Witches is a treasury of historical accounts of accused witches that sheds light on the reality behind the legends. Bringing to life stories like that of Eunice Cole, tried for attacking a teenage girl with a rock and buried with a stake through her heart; Jane Jacobs, a Bostonian so often accused of witchcraft that she took her tormentors to court on charges of slander; and Increase Mather, an exorcism-performing minister famed for his knowledge of witches, this volume provides a unique tour through the darkest history of English and North American witchcraft, never failing to horrify, intrigue, and delight.

Alice’s memorable last year of high school is being overshadowed by some very difficult situations. A sudden increase in vandalism at the school leads Alice to discover an angry and violent group of students—teenage Neo-Nazis. Then an awkward hallway encounter gets a classmate to confess that a new, attentive teacher has been taking advantage of her. All at once, Alice’s safe and comfortable school starts feeling strange and serious—all this plus the normal senior year pressures of college applications and life-making decisions. Alice has two options: step up or melt down. The choice is simple, and true to the character that readers have loved for years….Alice steps up—in a big way.

Gombrowicz's strange, bracing final novel probes the divide between young and old while providing a grotesque evocation of obsession. While recuperating from wartime Warsaw in the Polish countryside, the unnamed narrator and his friend, Fryderyk, attempt to force amour between two local youths, Karol and Henia, as a kind of a lewd entertainment. They become increasingly frustrated as they discover that the two have no interest in one another, and the games are momentarily stopped by a local murder and a directive to assassinate a rogue member of the Polish resistance. Gombrowicz connects these threads magnificently in a tense climax that imbues his novel with a deep sense of the absurd and multiplies its complexity. Gombrowicz is a relentless psychoanalyzer and a consummate stylist; his prose is precise and forceful, and the narrator's strained attempts to elucidate why he takes such pleasure at soiling youth creepily evoke authentic pride and disgust. Borchardt's translation (the first into English from the original Polish) is a model of consistency, maintaining a manic tone as it navigates between lengthy, comma-spliced sentences and sharp, declarative thrusts. - Publishers Weekly