The bond between Louise, Grant, Charlie, and Jim continues to strengthen as they move into a new chapter of their lives. Sharing their home together as two heterosexual couples they find themselves on a voyage of discovery. The importance of a healthy sex life overspills into the relationships they maintain with their family and friends. The myth of ‘with age comes experience’, is dispelled as Louise and Charlie become the teachers. There is a cyclonic change in the lives of the older siblings and friends of Louise and Grant’s Family. As new relationships develop, the complexities of life bring others to an end. With the turbulences of relationships that are challenged by modern day prejudices, they are met, by devastating affects upon those lives involved. With the love and support of those around them, it is possible for them to evolve and flourish. With the beginnings of a new life, like the eternal spring, love blossoms confirming that it is in your arms that I belong.

Rape, teen pregnancy, illegitimacy, domestic abuse - in 1970s Australia all were shameful secrets that trapped women in poverty, loss and ongoing emotional trauma. This is one woman's story of all she lost and how hard she fought to survive. A teenager in the 1970s, Gwen Wilson grew up in Western Sydney. It was a tough childhood. Illegitimate, fatherless - her mother in and out of psychiatric hospitals; it would have been easy for anyone to despair and give up. Yet Gwen had hope. Despite it all, she was a good student, fighting hard for a scholarship and a brighter future. Then she met Colin. Someone to love who would love her back. But that short-lived love wasn't the sanctuary Gwen was looking for. It was the start of a living hell. Rape was just the beginning. By sixteen she was pregnant, her education abandoned. Australian society did not tolerate single mothers; prejudice and discrimination followed her everywhere. In an effort to save her son, Jason, from the illegitimacy and deprivation she'd grown up with, Gwen chose to marry Colin - and too quickly the nightmare of physical abuse, poverty and homelessness seemed inescapable. In 1974, in the dying days of the forced adoption era in Australia, this isolated teenager was compelled to make a decision about her child that would tear her life apart, one she would never truly come to terms with. I Belong to No One is one woman's story of all she lost and how hard she fought to survive and eventually triumph.

After her father's third divorce, seventeen-year-old Natalia decides to move with her stepmother, Maureen, from Spain to Florida to learn more of Maureen's faith and to discover who she is away from her father's expectations. Includes reading group guide.

Amie Martin feels passionate about many issues. Choosing to forgive her old boyfriend is not one of them . . . Amie Martin has never been more ready to trade in her quaint seaside Maine hometown for a life of studying art in New York. But when old flame August Colton returns to Camden and proclaims his undying love, Amie is torn between her future plans and forgiving August’s secret past. Fresh out of college, August is intent on helping the family business as an architect. He’s finally earned the respect of his brother and grandfather and he’s finally glimpsing a way out from beneath his past. But when August’s grandfather suffers a health crisis and the woman he loves shows interest in a wandering artist staying at the bed and breakfast, August wonders if he won’t be paying for his past mistakes for the rest of his life. Can Amie and August find faith in each other again? More importantly, can they find a faith that heals the broken parts of their past? Book 6 in The Orchard House Bed and Breakfast Series is a contemporary twist on the well-loved classic, Little Women. Readers will fall in love with the Martin family—Maggie, Josie, Lizzie, Bronson, Amie, and their mother Hannah—each trying to find their own way in the world and each discovering that love, home, and hope are closer than they appear.

Returning to her roots Amish Homecoming by Jo Ann Brown Ten years ago, Amish quiltmaker Leah Beiler and her twin brother left their community without a word. Now she's come home—with her orphaned niece. Before she left, she dreamed of marrying handsome dairy farmer Ezra Stoltzfus. But now that she is raising a child who knows nothing of Amish ways, Ezra worries she'll leave again. Leah will have to prove to Ezra that her future is in Paradise Springs—with him. Snowbound with the Amish Bachelor by Patricia Johns For social worker Grace Schweitzer, arriving at Ben Hochstetler’s farm to pick up an abandoned baby feels like stepping into her past—especially after a blizzard forces her to stay. Helping on the farm reminds Grace of her Amish upbringing…and the reason she left. She’s losing her heart to Ben and the faith she once held dear, but has she changed too much to return to this life? 2 Uplifting Stories Amish Homecoming and Snowbound with the Amish Bachelor

'Fast and funny and happy-making' Lisa Williamson, author of THE ART OF BEING NORMAL Twelve hours, two boys, one girl . . . and a whole lot of hairspray. Seventeen-year-old Sunny's always been a little bit of a pushover. But when she's sent a picture of her boyfriend kissing another girl, she knows she's got to act. What follows is a mad, twelve-hour dash around London - starting at 8pm in Crystal Palace (so far away from civilisation you can't even get the Tube there) then sweeping through Camden, Shoreditch, Soho, Kensington, Notting Hill . . . and ending up at 8am in Alexandra Palace. Along the way Sunny meets a whole host of characters she never dreamed she'd have anything in common with - least of all the devilishly handsome (and somewhat vain) French 'twins' (they're really cousins) Jean Luc and Vic. But as this love-letter to London shows, a city is only a sum of its parts, and really it's the people living there who make up its life and soul. And, as Sunny discovers, everyone - from friends, apparent-enemies, famous bands and even rickshaw drivers - is willing to help a girl on a mission to get her romantic retribution. A fast-paced, darkly funny love letter to London, boys with big hair and the joys of staying up all night.

It's not only grief and loneliness that have tormented Tara since her husband's death. In her, something rises and crests like a wave. As she sits in squalor in a house that once knew love, she hears the deafening cry of a past she thought was stifled and the resurgence of the person she had been before. A girl with another name, who loved to laugh and dance, who believed in the innocence of childhood until she was overtaken by her country's demons. With her characteristic lyricism and precision, Nathacha Appanah offers us total immersion into a world of lost futures and hidden pasts, in which the implacable hand of fate can only be resisted at a price. Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

The novelette is set in the distant future where humans expended their influence on the solar system and far from its conventional borders. An engineer Wilfred lives and works in China. His life consists of his job, his beautiful wife and trips to the place named “island”. Since the beginning the earth was protected by Seven aliens who arrived to the planet each time there was any threat to it, but recently the tunnel between two realities they used was closed. Wilfred agrees to construct the new one. At the same time out of nowhere the woman named Anna appears in his life. Interaction between Wilfred, his wife and Anna reveals their common past, shaped future and ancient connection between Wilfred’s past life decisions and the tunnel that was recently closed.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it “The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Kashmir Hill’s fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality.”—John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Wired Winner of the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award • Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true? In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world. Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level. Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”

"Alta, Zaya, Nara, Oyuna and Dolgorna - a mother, three sisters, and the teenage daughter of one of the sisters - each tell their pieces of the family story, an epic fraught with secrets and betrayals, in All This Belongs to Me, the debut novel of Petra Hulova." "All This Belongs to Me transports the reader from Mongolia's harsh, dusty steppe to the clamor and grime of the capital, Ulaanbantar; from nomanic herding and felt tents to brothels and prefab apartment blocks. With a filmic eye and a dead-on ear, Hulova vividly conveys the landscapes and lives of three generations of women. Two of the sisters, born illegitimately of their mother's clandestine affairs with foreigners - one Chinese, one Russian - struggle with the stigma of being half-breeds, while the strict division of male and female labor and social roles plays out in the city and country alike, with devastating consequences." --Book Jacket.