The incredible story of the creation of a continent—our continent— from the acclaimed author of The Last Volcano and Mask of the Sun. The immense scale of geologic time is difficult to comprehend. Our lives—and the entirety of human history—are mere nanoseconds on this timescale. Yet we hugely influenced by the land we live on. From shales and fossil fuels, from lake beds to soil composition, from elevation to fault lines, what could be more relevant that the history of the ground beneath our feet? For most of modern history, geologists could say little more about why mountains grew than the obvious: there were forces acting inside the Earth that caused mountains to rise. But what were those forces? And why did they act in some places of the planet and not at others? When the theory of plate tectonics was proposed, our concept of how the Earth worked experienced a momentous shift. As the Andes continue to rise, the Atlantic Ocean steadily widens, and Honolulu creeps ever closer to Tokyo, this seemingly imperceptible creep of the Earth is revealed in the landscape all around us. But tectonics cannot—and do not—explain everything about the wonders of the North American landscape. What about the Black Hills? Or the walls of chalk that stand amongst the rolling hills of west Kansas? Or the fact that the states of Washington and Oregon are slowly rotating clockwise, and there a diamond mine in Arizona? It all points to the geologic secrets hidden inside the 2-billion-year-old-continental masses. A whopping ten times older than the rocky floors of the ocean, continents hold the clues to the long history of our planet. With a sprightly narrative that vividly brings this science to life, John Dvorak's How the Mountains Grew will fill readers with a newfound appreciation for the wonders of the land we live on.

Beyond the Wheat Field is a story about a woman who returns to room 6, her mother's bedroom, at the nursing home two years after her mother's death, seeking healing. Her past comes unraveled as memory after memory pour out into the room, hard things that began in the wheat field down the street from her home she grew up in. It led her down a path of addiction, broken relationships, and abuse. She had tucked them all safely in the dark places of her mind, never wanting to face them ever again. But through the deep prayers of her mother and a God that never let up, she finds healing and freedom.

Reproduction of the original: The Alaskan by James Oliver Curwood

THE OFFICIAL NORTH AMERICAN EDITION "Beguiling, audacious... rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue." —The Guardian This is a new kind of nature writing — one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape. Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is travelling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She is making a documentary about how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society: the “Mountain Man.” She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, a la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective. The book is a fictional time capsule curated by Erin, comprising of personal narrative, fact, anecdote, images and maps, on subjects as diverse as The Golden Records, Voyager 1, the moon landings, the appropriation of Native land and culture, Rachel Carson, The Order of The Dolphin, The Doomsday Clock, Ted Kaczynski, Valentina Tereshkova, Jack London, Thoreau, Darwin, Nuclear war, The Letters of Last Resort and the pill, amongst many other topics. "Refreshingly outward-looking in a literary culture that turns ever inward to the self, although it still has profound moments of introspection. Uplifting, with a thirsty curiosity, the writing is playful and exuberant. Riffing on feminist ideas but unlimited in scope, Andrews focuses our attention on our beautiful, doomed planet, and the astonishing things we have yet to discover." —Ruth McKee, The Irish Times

In the 1930's lighthouse keeping was dangerous and mundane, a way of life and isolation from life. Estonia was thriving and backward, unique and powerless. Women were submissive and yet the impetus for all things. And marriage was mandatory. But romantic love was the sweetest and most unlikely twist of fate. Paula is a woman I knew in my childhood. She was an Estonian immigrant. She was a mail-order bride. Her husband was an Estonian-American, a lighthouse keeper, a wife beater and maybe a pedophile. Paula, an educated woman in Estonia, came to this country not knowing the language or culture and was kept a virtual prisoner for more than a decade at a string of lighthouses on the rugged Alaskan coast. Paula was a woman who's life, while dictated by tradition, was full of excitement and adventure and characterized by passion and courage. And while at times there seems no end to the misery she endured, a love story unfolds. Come along on this true journey inside real lighthouse living and one woman's life.