Poems about cycling and other matters to do with living in the real world. This booklet shows that poetry can be about the seemingly mundane as seen through other eyes.A catalogue of poems about the fears and joys of cycling as well as what it's like to fall in and out of love. In this booklet the author explores those things that appear to be ordinary, yet through the gaze of a poet they become extraordinary. He looks at towns and the hidden beauties to be found there, relationships and why they often don't work, but most of all he turns his eyes on a fractured relationship with the bike, source of pleasure, fulfilment and irritation all in equal measure.It is also funny. Quite often.

Animal Adventure Story. Coming of age story through the eyes of a young gosling, Gracie. Gracie, discovers that it best to be true to yourself.Gracie, is a young gosling, with an active imagination. Her cousins tease her about turning into a grey, scrawny goose. Gracie doesn't want to turn grey, and leaves home hoping that life will be better. Through her many adventures, Gracie finally finds the most unlikely place to find help in coming to terms with growing up.

The rest of the pack call her Trouble, but how can this teenage White Wolf become an Ally of the People if she doesn't stick her nose in their business? She risks everything to be true to herself, but what will it cost her? Find out in this mystical short story inspired by Native American spirituality. First published for Devin O'Branagan's launch of her paranormal YA novel Glory.The rest of the pack call her Trouble, but how can this teenage White Wolf become an Ally of the People if she doesn't stick her nose in their business? The Native American spiritual traditions are rich with stories of the animal Allies (often called Power Animals or Animal Spirit Guides), who guide humans following the Good Red Road. Many stories focus on the human. But how do these guardian spirits learn how to serve their life purpose How do they come into their power so they can best guide the humans under their care to discover their Path and live their life in a good way?This coming of age story is about a young Wolf Ally who, like any teenage or young adult human, is trying to discover who she is and find her way in life. Her overbearing mother and critical Pack leaders try to make her follow their rules, but she defies their authority. Trouble risks everything to be true to herself, but what will it cost her? Find out in this mystical short story inspired by Native American spirituality.Author's Note:i have dreamed stories on numerous occasions. A dream inspired this story, though it doesn't resemble the original at all. It is my pleasure to give you this mystical tale while I write more Ally tales to compile a short story collection. I hope you will reach out to me and connect!

National BestsellerOne of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter-a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. From the Trade Paperback edition.

They needed no words between them… The man has no identity, no past and the mind of a genius packaged in rippling muscles and sun-seared skin. It was Dr. Elizabeth Holden’s job to uncover the mystery of this man, who seemed to speak only the language of the flesh. His blatant masculinity frightened and excited her all at once. But his savage facade hid a vulnerability only she had glimpsed. And like an animal forging through the deepest…darkest…densest woods, Elizabeth longed to give in to her primitive, unexplored desires. But was she ready to shed her inhibitions and let the real woman within her run wild…?

Paul Auster's most intimate autobiographical work to date In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . . Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior. From his baby's-eye view of the man in the moon, to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe, to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine, to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, Report from the Interior charts Auster's moral, political, and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the postwar 1950s and into the turbulent 1960s. Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life—and the many images that came at him, including moving images (he adored cartoons, he was in love with films), until, at its unique climax, the book breaks away from prose into pure imagery: The final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts, told in an album of pictures. At once a story of the times—which makes it everyone's story—and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

When we first met Paula Spencer - in The Woman Who Walked into Doors - she was thirty-nine, recently widowed, an alcoholic struggling to hold her family together. Paula Spencer begins on the eve of Paula's forty-eighth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her. They're grand kids, but she worries about Leanne. Paula still works as a cleaner, but all the others doing the job now seem to come from Eastern Europe, and the checkout girls in the supermarket are Nigerian. You can get a cappuccino in the café, and her sister Carmel is thinking of buying a holiday home in Bulgaria.

Narrated in the form of a Powerbook entry by Dan Underwood, a computer programmer for Microsoft, this state-of-the-art novel about life in the '90s follows the adventures of six code-crunching computer whizzes. Known as "microserfs," they spend upward of 16 hours a day "coding" (writing software) as they eat "flat" foods (such as Kraft singles, which can be passed underneath closed doors) and fearfully scan the company email to see what the great Bill might be thinking and whether he is going to "flame" one of them. Seizing the chance to be innovators instead of cogs in the Microsoft machine, this intrepid bunch strike out on their own to form a high-tech start-up company named Oop! in Silicon Valley. Living together in a sort of digital flophouse --"Our House of Wayward Mobility" -- they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world. Funny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age.

Meredith was promised nine years of safety, but they only gave her three. Her father, who was sent to prison for sexually abusing Meredith and other children in the small town, has been released early on good behaviour. He was supposed to be locked up until Meredith's eighteenth birthday, when she would be free of her abusive father and her delusional mother, who dwells on a fantasy that the three of them will be a happy family once more. But Meredith is only fifteen, and her father is out of prison…and her mother is bringing him home. And Meredith won't let him hurt her, or anyone else, ever again. No matter what the cost. Lyrical, suspenseful, and emotionally shattering, SUCH A PRETTY GIRL is the compelling story of one young woman's painful fight for survival - and her journey back to herself.

Joe Pickett's in his last week as the temporary game warden in the town of Baggs, Wyoming, but there have been strange things going on in the mountains, and his conscience won't let him leave without checking them out: reports of camps looted, tents slashed, elk butchered. And then there's the runner who simply vanished one day. Joe doesn't mind admitting that the farther he rides, the more he wishes he could just turn around and go home. And he is right to be concerned. Because what awaits him is like nothing he's ever dealt with, like something out of an old story, except this is all too real and too deadly. When he'd first saddled up, he'd thought of this as his last patrol. What he hadn't known was just how accurate that thought might turn out to be.

A NEW NOVELLA IN THE THIS MAN SERIES! You don't need to read the series to enjoy this story. But if you're already a Jesse Ward fan, just wait until you see the advice he gives Drew about falling in love. I thought I had control. I was so, so wrong...I don't need a relationship. I have Hux, a decadent club where I quench whatever raw desire I choose. I take pleasure and I give it - no strings attached. So when Raya Rivers comes in asking for someone cold, emotionless, and filthy... well, no man ever takes his wicked pleasure quite the way I do. Only Raya is different. Vulnerable. And carrying some deep sorrow that gets past all my carefully constructed walls and inexplicably makes me care. Now craving controls me. Ice has given way to red-hot need.But Raya has no idea about my other life - my real life. That I'm daddy to an adorable little girl. My two worlds are about to collide with the force of a...

Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a "w" to make his name "Hawthorne" in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom Houseand joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. -wikipedia

Cackling Carol must be the only witch in the world who hates cats! So she decides to get a dog instead. Together with her faithful and very clever Broom, she visits a dogs' home and finds Big Roddy, the biggest and shaggiest dog you could imagine. All Cackling Carol's witchy friends fall about laughing when they see him. But just who is it that saves them all from the wicked Wizard Egbert?Cackling Carol must be the only witch in the world who hates cats! But she really wants a pet to keep her company and so she decides to get a dog instead. Together with her faithful and very clever Broom, she visits a dogs' home. She's after a nice small dog that will fit on on Broom with her. But who does she come out with? Big Roddy, the biggest, bounciest and shaggiest dog you could imagine. All Cackling Carol's witchy friends fall about laughing when they meet him. But just who is it that saves them all from the wicked Wizard Egbert and his despicable spells? Not the cats, that's for sure!

Three is a trio of short stories that defy the scope of other collections. From the wrecked interior of a washed up writer's mind, to the depths of space, to the old city streets.The three stories included are:Fever DreamsStar SlightA Silver RingThree is a trio of short stories that defy the scope of traditional collections. The stories range from the interior of a washed up writer's mind to the cold depths of space.Fever Dreams: A writer spurns his tales from memories he had as a sick young boy. Now, he is out of ideas and is poisoning himself and panning for ideas. His wife hires a hospice service to try to force her husband to recover.Star Slight: Two astronauts and a cartographer are sent on an interstellar mission to map three planets. Disaster places them on a bleak red planet that is as low on hope as it is on water.A Silver Ring: A young boy is promised a heirloom ring by his father. However, his father is killed and his ring taken. Five years later, the boy is a man, and is seeking his birthright. A terrible tale of circular greed.

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer **