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Stuck at home caring for her severely depressed mother and abandoned by her father, Mazzy has only the day-to-day dramas of her neighborhood to keep her busy. But between flirting with the boy next door and worrying about the fact that she's flat-chested, Mazzy has to face the fact that her mom is emotionally paralyzed by a family tragedy. As readers delve into the story, they'll eventually discover what it was that tore Mazzy's family apart, and they'll see what it takes to put it back together. Despite its serious subject matter, Mazzy brings humor to the trying age of adolescence and gives readers just the kind of awkward, troubled, and endearing character they will gladly embrace.

When Josh's mother dies in a phobia-induced car crash, she leaves two questions for her grieving family: how did a snake get into her car and how do you mourn with no faith to guide you? Twelve-year-old Josh is left alone to find the answers. His father is building a time machine. His four-year-old brother's closest friend is a plastic Power Ranger. His psychiatrist offers nothing more than a blank journal and platitudes. Isolated by grief in a home where every day is pajama day, Josh makes death his research project. He tests the mourning practices of religions he doesn't believe in. He tries to mend his little brother's shattered heart. He observes, records and waits—for his life to feel normal, for his mother's death to make sense, for his father to come out of the basement. His observations, recorded in a series of journal entries, are funny, smart, insightful—and heartbreaking. His conclusions about the nature of love, loss, grief and the space-time continuum are nothing less than life-changing.

After meeting in the hospital where their babies are undergoing open-heart surgery, Becky and Adele resolve to remain friends whatever happens. The two women are from different backgrounds but they have had to face up to the same anxieties and it brings them together. Following the operation and the different way she and her husband face up to the situation brings Adele's marriage to Rory to crisis point and she turns to Becky. However, as their friendship deepens, Adele discovers something of the past and how the two families have been linked previously. Will their friendship survive or is it too dark a secret to share?

Safe. To Tracy, safe means having Mama close by. Years after her mother's death, Tracy still feels her presence. But the moment Tracy is forced into a car as she is walking home from school one day, safe is ripped away. In the aftermath of an unspeakable crime, thirteen-year-old Tracy must fight her way back to safety and find comfort in her mother's memory once again.Susan Shaw returns with a raw and moving story of a young rape victim's journey toward healing, empowered by poetry and music, family and friends.

A new novel from a scion of the new generation of writers in Africa. She tells the story of women in Africa: here it is misery, pain, agony, dilemmas, frustrations. She floats the reader on a world of inverted reality, which yet becomes the norm. With creative imagination, confronting the social realities, she seeks out the world of peace and tranquillity. But not without verisimilitude. The extremes of moral turpitude beget horrid outcomes, leaving suspense rather than resolution. Amma Darko is one of the most significant contemporary Ghanaian literary writers. She is the author of three previous novels: Faceless (Sub-Saharan, 2003), The Housemaid (Heinemann, 1999) and Beyond the Horizon (Heinemann, 1995).

Amidst the hectic pace of parenting, marriage and life, Tears of Joy for Mothers helps mothers escape for short periods of time to let their minds and emotions be swept away by characters and stories they can relate to-deep, heart-felt stories that will move them to tears of joy and appreciation for what God can do in and with their lives. These heart-tugging stories, gathered by America's most beloved story anthologizer, affirm the ultimate value in motherhood and help mothers everywhere grow in their appreciation for life and the children they love. A great gift for Mother's Day or all year round.

Perfect for book clubs, this rollicking novel follows a stay-at-home mother as she re-enters the workforce and juggles the demands of orchestrating a has-been celebrity's comeback. Julia Einstein knew that being a stay-at-home mom had a lot in common with her former job as a celebrity publicist - endless, irrational demands, little to no appreciation, and constant hustle. But it isn't until her husband is laid off from his job and she's forced to go back to work and resurrect screen legend Mary Ford's career that Julia realizes how very much she prefers an actual child to a formerly famous client.For example, her child doesn't steal ten-thousand-dollar leather coats from photo shoots. Nor does he require a constant, fresh supply of a soda that is no longer in production. He doesn't curse at Julia, pronounce her name'Einstein'with a thick layer of disdainful irony, or incessantly poke at her with his index finger while reciting odd variations on childlike rhymes like a psych patient on day pass. With a mortgage looming and three years out of the business, however, Julia knows she has no choice but to make Mary's comeback a success. Even if it kills her.Which, at this pace, is a possibility. But if there is one thing Julia has learned from her time off from the office, it's that sheer determination can solve almost everything. After all, if she can get through suburban living with its uncontrolled clutter and playground politics, how hard can it be to resuscitate the career of an aging, desperate has-been? And get over the fact that her husband is a better stay-at-home mom than Julia ever was?

A'heartwarming and heartbreaking'• story of a Korean American girl's search for her rootsSomebody's Daughter is the story of nineteen-year-old Sarah Thorson, who was adopted as a baby by a Lutheran couple in the Midwest. After dropping out of college, she decides to study in Korea and becomes more and more intrigued by her Korean heritage, eventually embarking on a crusade to find her birth mother. Paralleling Sarah's story is that of Kyung-sook, who was forced by difficult circumstances to let her baby be swept away from her immediately after birth, but who has always longed for her lost child.

Ann Beattie, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Bausch, and twenty-one other celebrated American writers contribute to this moving anthology of fiction, compiled by the editors of the Glimmer Train literary quarterly. In the ten-plus years since Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda B. Swanson-Davies founded Glimmer Train, they have introduced an astonishing array of talented and innovative authors to a growing readership hungry for inspiring fiction. The stunning stories in this anthology -- many of which have never appeared anywhere except in Glimmer Train Stories -- explore one of the most complex emotional and psychological ties of all: motherhood, and its many facets. The writers in Mother Knows include established authors as well as up-and-coming talents like Junot DÍaz and award-winning writers like Robin Bradford, Nancy Reisman, Lee Martin, and Doug Crandell. Their stories demonstrate that motherhood is more than toilet training and tantrum control, as they portray the full, fierce, joyous, and frightening range of experience that marks this state of being. Mother Knows is a thoughtful and powerful exploration of the most mysterious bond in life.

From bestselling author Alan Dean Foster, an exciting early Pip and Flinx novel that shows the origins of a certain boy with special powers—and the mini-dragon that becomes his devoted sidekick....Flinx was just a freckle-faced, redheaded kid with green eyes and a strangely compelling stare when Mather Mastiff first saw him an the auctioneer's block. One hundred credits and he was hers.For years the old woman was his only family. She loved him, fed him, taught him everything she knew—even let him keep the deadly flying dragon he called Pip. But when Mother Mastiff mysteriously disappears, Flinx tails her kidnappers on a dangerous journey. Across the forests and swamps of the winged world called Moth, their only weapons are Pip's venom... and Flinx's unusual talent.

Fatherless and cast off as a baby by her mother, Micki Forrester's only family has been Gram, the energetic woman who raised Micki from birth. When, as adult, Micki leaves for a long-anticipated tour of the Holy Lands, she never guesses that secrets about her past are traveling with her. When news reaches Micki that Gram has been hospitalized, she wants to return to the States immediately. But Gram insists she remain in Israel, and this event triggers an avalanche of revelations more overwhelming to Micki than what she's learning of the history of the Holy Lands. She may not have come to Galilee with love, but will it be the place where she can discover love's true meaning-and learn to hold it in her heart forever?

In this Read & Listen edition of a popular Little Golden Book, Mommy finds a way to make everyday a special day for her loved ones—from an afternoon at the baseball stadium, to a visit to the museum, to a rainy day indoors. This ebook includes Read & Listen audio narration.

The acclaimed debut of Japan's “master storyteller” (Chicago Tribune). With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Banana Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart. In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, Kitchen and its companion story, Moonlight Shadow, are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul. “Lucid, earnest and disarming... [It] seizes hold of the reader's sympathy and refuses to let go.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times