Award-winning novelist Mary Morris weaves together an unsolved family mystery, a poignant coming-of-age story, and a little-known corner of World War II history in this lyrical novel of family, loss and, ultimately, love.

Thirty years ago, Laura's mother, Viola, went missing. She left behind her purse, her keys and her mysterious paintings of a red house. Viola was never found, and her family never recovered. Laura, an artist herself, held on to the paintings. On the back of each work, her mother scrawled in Italian, I will not be here forever. The family never understood what Viola meant.

Decades later, at a crossroads in her marriage and her life, Laura returns to Italy, where her parents met after World War II. Laura spent the earliest years of her childhood there before the family moved to New Jersey and settled into an American dream that eventually became a nightmare. Viola, who claimed to be an orphan, staunchly refused to speak of her life before marriage.

In Italy, Laura finds herself on a strange scavenger hunt to solve the puzzle of her mother's lost years. She is certain that the paintings of the red house hold the answer to her mother's past and her search takes her from her hometown of Brindisi, deep into Puglia where she encounters a man who knew her mother and who illuminates little-known secrets of Italy's Second World War.

Blending elements of true crime with settings that evoke Elena Ferrante, Laura follows her mother's trajectory as she ventures north to Naples, Turin and finally home. Along the way, she confronts the dark truth of her mother's story and at last makes sense of her own.

'A remarkable work' - Irish Times

The newly discovered diary of a wartime nurse makes for a fascinating, dramatic and uniquely personal insight into the experience of being on the frontline of service during the Second World War.

As the war gets underway, eighteen-year-old trainee nurse Mary Mulry arrives in London from Ireland, hoping for adventure. Little does she know what the next seven years will bring.

In this extraordinary account, Mary records in intimate detail her day-to-day life as a nurse, both on the Home Front and abroad. From nursing children during bombing raids in London to treating Allied soldiers in Normandy, Mary's experiences gave her vivid and unforgettable material for the private diary she was dedicated to keeping. We feel her strength of character during the risk of infection, the threat of shrapnel, and the ongoing hunger of rationing, but we also feel her warmth as she connects to her patients and, eventually, celebrates victory.

Filled with romance, action, and an inevitable sadness, A Very Private Diary records the rich memories of an irrepressible personality that shone during our darkest hour.

Weaving diverse cultures, vast landscapes, and ecological concerns, crossing beauty with danger, these poems are an invitation to the realm of possibility and enchantment. A flamenco dancer seduces his audience in Spain, and lovers travel through Istanbul. Writers live in exile while a menu for a dictator endangers the earth. The full moon shines over the Serengeti as nocturnal animals gather. Glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro melt too quickly. A poet writes from his house near the beached skeleton of a whale. Lanterns in the Night Market is a love letter to the world.

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

Boomtown Chicago, 1920s--a world of gangsters, musicians, and clubs. Young Benny Lehrman, born into a Jewish hat-making family, is expected to take over his father's business, but his true passion is piano--especially jazz. After dark, he sneaks down to the South Side to hear the bands play.

One night he is asked to sit in with a group. His playing is first-rate. The trumpeter, a black man named Napoleon, becomes Benny's friend and musical collaborator. They are asked to play at a saloon Napoleon has christened The Jazz Palace. But Napoleon's main gig is at a mob establishment, which doesn't take kindly to their musicians freelancing . As Benny and Napoleon navigate the highs and the lows of the Jazz Age, a bond is forged between them that is as memorable as it is lasting. Morris brilliantly captures the dynamic atmosphere and dazzling music of an exceptional era.

This is a collection of women's travel writings, including work by Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Mildred Cable, Willa Cather, Isak Dinesen, and others. In wry, lyrical, and sometimes wistful voices, they write of disguising themselves as men for safety, of longing for family left behind or falling in love with people met along the way, and of places as diverse as icy Himalayan passes and dusty American pioneer towns, the darkly wooded Siberian landscape and the lavender-covered hills of Provence. Yet even as their voices, experiences, and paths vary, they share with one another--and with us as readers--reflections upon their gender as it is illuminated by unfamiliar surroundings. Edited and with an Introduction by Mary Morris, in collaboration with Larry O'Connor.

Contributors and writings include:
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Pariah
Frances Trollope, from Domestic Manners of the Americans
Eliza Farnham, from Life in Prairie Land
Isabella Bird, from A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
Margaret Fountaine, from Love Among the Butterflies
Gertrude Bell, from The Desert and the Sown
Edith Wharton, from In Morocco
Willa Cather, from Willa Cather in Europe
Isak Dinesen, from Out of Africa
Kate O'Brien, from Farewell Spain
Rebecca West, from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Ella Maillart, from The Cruel Way
Emily Hahn, from Times and Places
M.F.K. Fisher, from Long Ago in France
Joan Didion, from The White Album
Christina Dodwell, from Travels with Fortune: An African Adventure
Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk
Gwendolyn MacEwen, from Noman's Land

In 1492, two history-altering events occurred: the Jews and Muslims of Spain were expelled, and Columbus set sail for the New World. Many Spanish Jews chose not to flee and instead became Christian in name only, maintaining their religious traditions in secret. Among them was Luis de Torres, who accompanied Columbus as an interpreter. Over the centuries, de Torres' descendants traveled across North America, finally settling in the hills of New Mexico. Now, some five hundred years later, it is in these same hills that Miguel Torres, a young amateur astronomer, finds himself trying to understand the mystery that surrounds him and the town he grew up in: Entrada de la Luna, or Gateway to the Moon.

Poor health and poverty are the norm in Entrada, and luck is rare. So when Miguel sees an ad for a babysitting job in Santa Fe, he jumps at the opportunity. The family for whom he works, the Rothsteins, are Jewish, and Miguel is surprised to find many of their customs similar to those his own family kept but never understood. Braided throughout the present-day narrative are the powerful stories of the ancestors of Entrada's residents, portraying both the horrors of the Inquisition and the resilience of families. Moving and unforgettable, Gateway to the Moon beautifully weaves the journeys of the converso Jews into the larger American story.

The poems of Dear October chronicle the evolution of the natural world and a daughter caring for her mother during the last year of her life. Months of the final year act as the scaffolding for the collection, as they reflect on the twelve moons. The spirit of home, family, and mother-daughter relationship intertwine with the diversity of culture and ecology in northern New Mexico. Dear October is a gathering of poems on the intimacy of caring for a dying parent at home, while being acutely aware of the progression of time and the natural world. The poems were often the way the author prepared for loss--written through events, memory, landscape, myth, and dreams. The writing regards a childhood in Oklahoma but mostly celebrates the diverse landscape and cultures of New Mexico.

In the fall of 2005 acclaimed writer Mary Morris set off down the Mississippi River in a battered old houseboat called The River Queen, with two river rats named Tom and Jerry and an ailing, irascible rat terrier named Samantha Jean. Her father had just died. Her daughter had gone off to college. Lost and uncertain, Morris returned to the river of her youth, to the waterside towns where her father had once lived. In this poignant and often humorous memoir, Morris reclaims the world of her childhood as she gets a bearing on her future. She describes traveling down stream through the Midwest, living like a pirate as she survives a tornado and infestation of mayflies, bivouacs on beaches, and ties up to paddleboats in the dark of night. As she learns to pilot the River Queen through these fabled waters, Morris delivers a memoir that deserves to be both a best-seller and a classic (The Courier-Journal).

When Tess Winterstone returns to her suburban childhood home after almost 30 years to attend a high school reunion, memories flood back, firmly shut doors open, and the betrayal by her father decades earlier comes to rest. Masterfully weaving the complexities of familial love and rosy 1950s suburban life with the dark underside of such a reality, Mary Morris movingly portrays a woman coming to terms with a warm and charming father's duplicity.

Since publishing its original edition of A Woman's World in 1995, Travelers' Tales has been the recognized leader in women's travel literature, and with the launch of the annual series The Best Travelers' Tales in 2004, the obvious next step was an annual collection of the best women's travel writing of the year. This title is the first in an annual series--The Best Women's Travelers' Tales--that presents stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The points of view and perspectives are global in reach, and themes are as eclectic as in all of our books, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.
In this book you will:
- Discover the sex appeal of a big butt in Senegal
- Become a door-to-door art saleswoman in Madrid and uncover Spanish generosity
- Learn what it means to serve in Mother Teresa's mission in Calcutta
- Discover a universe of meaning in a simple Parisian restaurant
-Watch your mother transform before your very eyes in a classroom in Laos...and much more.

Read a Bit Talk a Bit is a series of reading activity books intended for people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The books start with a short article or story for the participants to read, followed by a number of questions for the facilitator to ask. These questions are formulated to engage the participants in conversation and to encourage personal and meaningful reminiscences to flow.

One of NPR's Best Books of the Year

From the author of Nothing to Declare, a moving travel narrative examining healing, redemption, and what it means to be a solo woman on the road.

In February 2008, a casual afternoon of ice skating derailed the trip of a lifetime. Mary Morris was on the verge of a well-earned sabbatical, but instead she endured three months in a wheelchair, two surgeries, and extensive rehabilitation. One morning, when she was supposed to be in Morocco, Morris was lying on the sofa reading Death in Venice, casting her eyes over these words again and again: He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers. Disaster shifted to possibility and Morris made a decision. When she was well enough to walk again, she would go all the way to the tigers.

So begins a three-year odyssey that takes Morris to India on a tiger safari in search of the world's most elusive apex predator. Written in over a hundred short chapters accompanied by the author's photographs, this travel memoir offers an elegiac, wry, and wise look at a woman on the road and the glorious, elusive creature she seeks.

A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the of Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon's prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner with Hades, these are haunting poems of loss and unearthing, equally bold, personal, and tender.

From Dinner with Hades

He shows me a birthday cake, candled. My name is written in pomegranate
seeds. It's like vertigo. Just before he seeks to devour, he halts to birdsong--
sound of goldfinch, bluebird, hawk, lilting of sparrows. Of whippoorwill
and dove. Wings flap, so many wings, a cool breeze as leaves unfurl into a
once forgotten green and I am back on earth, held in my mother's arms.

Shelley is embarrassed by her mother's work. Why can't she get a decent job? At the pool, Ben is afraid of the water, but persists in hanging around the edge, and Tania in the wheelchair is organising a disco. Adapted from Robin Klein's novel.

Read a Bit Talk a Bit is a series of reading activity books intended for people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The books start with a short article or story for the participants to read, followed by a number of questions for the facilitator to ask. These questions are formulated to engage the participants in conversation and to encourage personal and meaningful reminiscences to flow.

Read a Bit Talk a Bit is a series of reading activity books intended for people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The books start with a short article or story for the participants to read, followed by a number of questions for the facilitator to ask. These questions are formulated to engage the participants in conversation and to encourage personal and meaningful reminiscences to flow.

Read a Bit Talk a Bit is a series of reading activity books intended for people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The books start with a short article or story for the participants to read, followed by a number of questions for the facilitator to ask. These questions are formulated to engage the participants in conversation and to encourage personal and meaningful reminiscences to flow.

Read a Bit Talk a Bit is a series of reading activity books intended for people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The books start with a short article or story for the participants to read, followed by a number of questions for the facilitator to ask. These questions are formulated to engage the participants in conversation and to encourage personal and meaningful reminiscences to flow.

Read a Bit Talk a Bit is a series of reading activity books intended for people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The books start with a short article or story for the participants to read, followed by a number of questions for the facilitator to ask. These questions are formulated to engage the participants in conversation and to encourage personal and meaningful reminiscences to flow.

Read a Bit Talk a Bit is a series of reading activity books intended for people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The books start with a short article or story for the participants to read, followed by a number of questions for the facilitator to ask. These questions are formulated to engage the participants in conversation and to encourage personal and meaningful reminiscences to flow.