Literary Fiction

Extreme Malice by Ray Swirsky

She was found with a guitar string still wrapped tightly around her soft neck. Eighteen year old Josh Anderson, the college boy from next door, is charged with her murder. It was his guitar string around her neck. His footprints are found inside her house. Her earring found under his bed. Donna Gardner’s husband Jack was hundreds of miles away on business.
Was it the perfect murder?

Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary true story of four men who take the law into their own hands.
 
This is the story of four young boys. Four lifelong friends. Intelligent, fun-loving, wise beyond their years, they are inseparable. Their potential is unlimited, but they are content to live within the closed world of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. And to play as many pranks as they can on the denizens of the street. They never get caught. And they know they never will.
 
Until one disastrous summer afternoon.
 
On that day, what begins as a harmless scheme goes horrible wrong. And the four find themselves facing a year’s imprisonment in the Wilkinson Home for Boys. The oldest of them is fifteen, the youngest twelve. What happens to them over the course of that year–brutal beatings, unimaginable humiliation–will change their lives forever.
 
Years later, one has become a lawyer. One a reporter. And two have grown up to be murderers, professional hit men. For all of them, the pain and fear of Wilkinson still rages within. Only one thing can erase it.
 
Revenge.
 
To exact it, they will twist the legal system. Commandeer the courtroom for their agenda. Use the wiles they observed on the streets, the violence they learned at Wilkinson.
 
If they get caught this time, they only have one thing left to lose: their lives.
 
Praise for Sleepers
 
“Undeniably powerful, an enormously affecting and intensely human story . . . Sleepers is a thriller, to be sure, but it is equally a wistful hymn to another age.”—The Washington Post Book World
 
“A powerful book, hard to forget . . . Carcaterra is an excellent writer, changing pace here and there but never letting the reader go. . . . Sensitive, humorous, and harrowing, featuring dialogue with perfect pitch.”–The Denver Post

“A gut-wrenching piece of work . . . [Lorenzo] Carcaterra’s graphic narrative grips like gunfire in a dark alley.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A terrifying account of brutality and retribution, searing in its emotional truth, peopled with murderers, sadists, and thugs, but biblical in its passion and scope.”—People

The After Wife by Melanie Summers

From bestselling author Melanie Summers, comes a heartfelt and uplifting tale of love, loss, and letting go…

After losing her husband, writer Abigail Carson has all but given up on life. Having spent the last year cocooned in her Manhattan apartment, Abigail is suddenly forced to find a new home where she can stretch her dwindling savings. Intent on isolation, she moves to a tiny village in Nova Scotia where she’ll have no one to interrupt her solitude.

Little does Abigail realize that small-town life offers far less privacy than the big city. With neighbors knocking on the door bearing homemade treats and invitations, Abby soon finds herself immersed in the lives of the people of South Haven. She forms an unlikely friendship with Liam Wright, the handyman renovating her dilapidated cottage, and his daughter, seven-year-old Olive.

As the dark cloud engulfing Abigail lifts, she starts to think she may have found love again. But just as Abigail is ready to leap, she discovers Liam carries with him a shocking secret that will ultimately cause everything to unravel. Abigail must decide if she will turn away from his pain or open her heart in the most hopeless of circumstances.

Insightful, heartwarming, and filled with hope, The After Wife reminds us of the importance of human connection and the inseparable nature of love and survival.

The Family Legacy – Shaping Culture from the Inside Out: How to Lead Your Family, Live Your Legacy, and Shape Culture in the Process by Randall W. Bixby

The solutions set forth in this book and the Family Legacy Model™ with the six protocols will ABSOLUTELY equip you to transform your family. This is a practical guide to doing family that will cause your family to thrive today. The Family Legacy practices will ensure an enduring legacy for generations to come. As a result, I believe that businesses, communities, cultures, and nations will be transformed from the inside-out as well.

The Family Legacy Model™ is intentionally designed to equip people to know their true identity, empowering them to properly self-govern, which enables them to generationally steward the family as designed while teaching the next generation to do the same. As a result, the culture will be transformed from the inside-out.

The Family Legacy Model™
Six protocols for a thriving family, an enduring legacy and a transformed culture

Family Legacy EQ EQ= Emotional Intelligence
Creating an environment of safety, trust,
support, forgiveness, love, purpose and FUN

Family Legacy Identity Discovering together your family identity
and uniqueness: past, present and future:
creating a Family Coat of Arms, Family vision
values, and purpose, family song and family painting

Family Legacy Ritual The regular* family meeting framework:
Food, Fun, Story, Wisdom, and a supportive coach
approach

Family Legacy Ventures The annual* family learning and legacy
adventure trip or vacation.

Family Legacy M.I.S.S.I.O.N. The Momentary, Intentional, Specific,
Supportive, Intervention, as One, in
response to a Need

Family Legacy Impartation How to intentionally impart the most
important things so your legacy endures.
The wisdom, blessing, stuff, unfinished business, and
The Family Legacy Generational Covenant.

The Fat Rules by Misti D. Mosteller

“Smart, witty, funny, painful, honest, brutal, forgiving. Truly amazing and left me wanting more!”
“This was laugh-out-loud funny and relatable. I felt like I was reading my best friend’s diary.”
–Amazon Five Star Reviews

Maddy Quinn survived being a fat kid and a fat adolescent, but being fat in her twenties is too much. Maddy is a smart, funny, chunky monkey living in a world of skinnies with only an XXL sweater set to keep her safe.

Living at home, Maddy attends a nearby university where she majors in Political Science and Not Being Noticed. Her mother would return her to the womb for safekeeping if only there was room for a 266 1/2 lb. adult, and her grandmother has never met an emotion that couldn’t be suffocated with mashed potatoes or chicken fried steak.

Despite the over-love of a nutty family and the support of good, but skinny friends, waddling around campus is getting harder. In an effort to keep daily humiliations to a minimum, Maddy lives by rules she’s developed to hide in plain sight.
Fat Rule #2
Never run in front of other humans, even if being chased by a mass-murdering maniac. Better to die with honor than let that jelly jiggle!
But when her birthday turns into Celebration Humiliation, Maddy’s best friend, Sam, gives her a dose of tough love that would put an elephant down, setting Maddy on a life-changing course that includes Richard Simmons and a date with a college guy, or two.

Part memoir, part wishful thinking, The Fat Rules is a laugh-out-loud ride on the crazy train with genuine, heart-breaking insight into the emotional pain of being overweight. If you’ve ever struggled with weight issues, finding your place in the world, or incapacitating insecurity, Maddy Quinn is right there with you.

You Deserve Itby Dr. Josh Wagner

Do you ever look around at friends, family, colleagues, or the people you grew up with and wonder why their lives appear to be more successful than yours?

Do you find yourself feeling at times you don’t quite measure up, while others seem to be so happy and in control?

And no matter how many self-help books or therapists you try, you’re still not getting the positive results you want in life…?

Until now.

In his groundbreaking book, YOU DESERVE IT, renowned international speaker and mindset coach Dr. Josh Wagner reveals an incredibly simple new pathway to fulfillment. His pioneering work demonstrates how unconscious undeserving beliefs are the obstacle standing in the way of your goals, happiness and peace of mind.

“Your reality is a reflection of what you believe you deserve in life,” he says, having compared the thought patterns of the highest achievers to those who struggle.

Here, Dr. Wagner leads you through his revolutionary 3-step Deserving Process, combining clear explanations, doable action steps and practical exercises to move you through life’s toughest challenges to achieving your biggest dreams.

He also offers real-life accounts of people who have transformed their lives by shifting their ingrained deserving beliefs.  And he wants you to have this too.

What better time to start your same journey than now?

Stray City: A Novel by Chelsey Johnson

“A thoughtful and joyous literary experience that celebrates its characters and liberally rewards its readers.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

"I tore through this novel like an orphaned reader seeking a home in its ragtag yet shimmering world." — Carrie Brownstein

“Our ’90s nostalgia is hella high these days, and this tender, funny story made our aging hipster hearts sing.” — Marie Claire

A warm, funny, and whip-smart debut novel about rebellious youth, inconceivable motherhood, and the complications of belonging–to a city, a culture, and a family–when none of them can quite contain who you really are.

All of us were refugees of the nuclear family . . .

Twenty-three-year-old artist Andrea Morales escaped her Midwestern Catholic childhood–and the closet–to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular lesbian underground of Portland, Oregon. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend’s betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man. To her utter shock, Andrea soon discovers she’s pregnant–and despite the concerns of her astonished circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby.

A decade later, when her precocious daughter Lucia starts asking questions about the father she’s never known, Andrea is forced to reconcile the past she hoped to leave behind with the life she’s worked so hard to build.

A thoroughly modern and original anti-romantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we’re born into and the families we choose, about finding yourself by breaking the rules, and making bad decisions for all the right reasons.