From New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Ann Packer, a ?tour de force family drama? (Elle) that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades. Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded...  more

From New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Ann Packer, a ?tour de force family drama? (Elle) that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades. Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of his future family, Bill buys the property and proposes to Penny Greenway, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life appeals to him. In less than a decade they have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, overwhelmed and undersatisfied, chafing at the conventions confining her. Years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence sets off a struggle over the family?s future. One by one, they tell their stories, which reveal Packer?s ?great compassion for her characters, with their ancient injuries, their blundering desires. The way she tangles their perspectives perfectly, painfully captures the tumult of selves within a family? (MORE Magazine). Reviewers have praised Ann Packer?s ?brilliant ear for character? (The New York Times Book Review) and her ?naturalist?s vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented? (The New Yorker). Her talents are on dazzling display in The Children?s Crusade, ?an absorbing novel that celebrates family even as it catalogs its damages? (People, Book of the Week). This is a ?superb storyteller? (San Francisco Chronicle), Ann Packer?s most deeply affecting book yet, ?tragic and utterly engrossing? (O, The Oprah Magazine).

The stunning second novel from National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak?a heartbreaking, captivating story about a family awaiting the return of their youngest son from the Vietnam War. In a small town in Pennsylvania?s Endless Mountains Hannah and her son Bo mourn the loss of the family...  more

The stunning second novel from National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak?a heartbreaking, captivating story about a family awaiting the return of their youngest son from the Vietnam War. In a small town in Pennsylvania?s Endless Mountains Hannah and her son Bo mourn the loss of the family patriarch, Jozef Vinich. They were three generations under one roof. Three generations, but only one branch of a scraggy tree; they are a war-haunted family in a war-torn century. Having survived the trenches of World War I as an Austro-Hungarian conscript, Vinich journeyed to America and built a life for his family. His daughter married the Hungarian-born Bexhet Konar, who enlisted to fight with the Americans in the Second World War but brought disgrace on the family when he was imprisoned for desertion. He returned home to Pennsylvania a hollow man, only to be killed in a hunting accident on the family?s land. Finally, in 1971, Hannah?s prodigal younger son, Sam, was reported MIA in Vietnam. And so there is only Bo, a quiet man full of conviction, a proud work ethic, and a firstborn?s sense of duty. He is left to grieve but also to hope for reunion, to create a new life, to embrace the land and work its soil through the seasons. The Signal Flame is a stirring novel about generations of men and women and the events that define them, brothers who take different paths, the old European values yielding to new world ways, and the convalescence of memory and war. Beginning shortly after Easter in 1972 and ending on Christmas Eve this ambitious novel beautifully evokes ordinary time, a period of living and working while waiting and watching and expecting. The Signal Flame is gorgeously written, honoring the cycles of earth and body, humming with blood and passion, and it confirms Andrew Krivak as a writer of extraordinary vision and power.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | A Best Nonfiction Title of the Year fromNylon | A Best Book of the Year byBookPage| A Must-Read Title of the Fall byEntertainment Weekly, W Magazine,  The Portland Press Herald, andBook Reporter| A Great Nonfiction Title of September by Bustle |A...  more

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | A Best Nonfiction Title of the Year fromNylon | A Best Book of the Year byBookPage| A Must-Read Title of the Fall byEntertainment Weekly, W Magazine,  The Portland Press Herald, andBook Reporter| A Great Nonfiction Title of September by Bustle |A Notable Nonfiction Debut of the Year byPoets & Writers|A Barnes & Noble Discover Pick |A Publisher's WeeklyPick of the Week When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse, a sign of good fortune, she thought, for her and her mother, Crystal. But that moment of darkness foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine.     It took twelve years to find the killer. In that time, Sarah rebuilt her shattered life amidst abandonment, police interrogations, and the exacting toll of trauma. She dreamed of a trial, but when that day came it brought no closure. It was not her mother?s death she wanted to understand, but her life. She began her own investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the darkness of an American town.     A memoir of ?unerring power and hard-won wisdom? and a ?tender elegy?* for a mother lost, with After the Eclipse ?Perry succeeds in restoring her mother?s humanity and her own? (New York Times Book Review).   *Margo Jefferson

When Liz’ s mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York TImes...  more

When Liz’ s mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York TImes scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. Breaking Night is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman’ s indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds.