Lyrical. Poignant. Funny. Captures the essence of living as a perpetual outsider in Israel. Sarah Tuttle-Singer, author of Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered

American-born Jennifer traces her journey-both on and off the yoga mat-reckoning with her adopted country (Israel), midlife hormones (merciless), cross-cultural marriage (to a Frenchman) and their imminent empty nest (a mixed blessing), eventually realizing the words her yoga teachers had been offering for the past twenty-three years: root down into the ground and stay true to yourself. Finally, she understands that home is about who you are, not where you live. Written in experimental chapterettes, Landed spans seven years (and then some), each punctuated with chakra wisdom from nationally-acclaimed Rodney Yee, her first teacher.

For anyone who has ever loved deeply and been willing to take risks for the sake of love. Rachel Barenbaum author of Atomic Anna

When American-born Jennifer falls in love with French-born Philippe during the First Intifada in Israel, she understands their relationship isn't perfect.

Both 23, both Jewish, they lead very different lives: she's a secular tourist, he's an observant immigrant. Despite their opposing outlooks on two fundamental issues-country and religion-they are determined to make it work. For the next 20 years, they root and uproot their growing family, each longing for a singular place to call home.

In Places We Left Behind, Jennifer puts her marriage under a microscope, examining commitment and compromise, faith and family while moving between prose and poetry, playing with language and form, daring the reader to read between the lines.

A powerful testimony about the ways neurodiverse couples can cause each other unintentional hurt. Mona Kay, MSW, Ph.D., host of the 'Neurodiverse Love' podcast

In a late-life romance, Eleanor marries Lars, a brilliant database expert, believing their fairytale love will last forever. However, just months later, Eleanor finds herself in COVID lockdown with her new husband as he loses his job and pulls away from her with angry outbursts. Day by day, their marriage fractures.

As Eleanor's fears about Lars' autistic profile are heightened, she struggles to understand him and their growing conflict. Even as both partners are diagnosed with cancer, Eleanor fights for what she hopes is possible in their marriage and encourages Lars to do the same.

That is until Lars refuses to work with an autism coach to improve their communication and Eleanor must decide whether she will give up her dream of happiness and, if so, how.

Disconnected powerfully portrays the obstacles that neurodiverse couples must overcome to keep their love alive. It will resonate with anyone who struggles to grasp how even the closest bonds can break, and then must create a new life.

You'll finish wanting a sequel. Dan Mulhern, J.D., Former First Gentleman of Michigan

It's 1974 and Dr. Dorothy Morrissey becomes the first female psychologist at St. Lawrence Asylum in Lansing, Michigan.

Dorothy's patients mirror her emotional issues as they draw her into their often-chaotic lives. Thomas Perfect's impulsiveness and attention-seeking behavior-both symptoms of his bipolar disorder-often prove dangerous as a gay man in 1970s Lansing, Michigan. His flair for drama makes Dorothy laugh as much as his trauma makes her want to cry. Dorothy wrestles with an inexplicable aversion to George who had been remanded to St. Lawrence after pleading Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. Ruth's post-partum psychiatric break threatens to draw Dorothy in with her, and Marcella, labeled as borderline frustrates Dorothy's efforts to keep her from self-harm.

As good as Dorothy is at holding and interpreting her patients' past traumas, she resists looking at her own, causing a strain on her relationship with Kenneth. It seems Dorothy has no problem saving her patients... but can she save herself?

Irreverent in a deliciously feminist way... Had me laughing out loud and wanting to share and discuss it with my closest girlfriends. Maria Leonard Olsen, author of the Amazon bestseller 50 After 50: Reframing the Next Chapter of Your Life

Cordelia Frances Biddle's Listen to Me: The Women of the Bible Speak Out envisions a feminist perspective for well-known narratives. Blending fire and humor, she reveals Eve, Ruth, Bathsheba, Queen Vashti, Delilah, et al, as real people possessing complex and turbulent inner lives.

Using contemporary language, she invites the reader to challenge assumptions and shibboleths while the women gather in pairs and as a group to recount their personal histories. From Babylon to the dicey and pricy burgs of Sodom and Gomorrah to 21st Century Manhattan, Eve and her companions' longing and rage, trauma, hope, outrage and empathy create a sisterhood that is readily transferred to modern society.

A nonbinary God makes an occasional appearance, chastising the men who crafted the tales. Adam, Abel and Cain also attempt to reconcile their created images with the emotional truths of their existences.

Listen to Me is a story of solidarity and strength as the women of the Bible stand together and confront millennia of misogyny.

The novel is a vital shout for equality.

Poignant Jo Freeman, civil rights activist, a founding member of the feminist movement, author

Badass Bill Ayers, political organizer, anti-war activist, author

Now 80 years old, retirement and advanced age have dissipated the spirit of six college radicals of the 1960s, who jointly had participated in civil rights campaigns and anti-war protests. Having engaged in only periodic communication over the decades, they suddenly receive an invitation to reunite for an extended weekend. Struggling with whether to go, each of them has divergent qualms and expectations for the proposed gathering.

During their three days together, they confront their inner demons, each other, and their future. Does Rebecca, the prime mover of the event, find solace after losing her wife and career? Can Malaika regain her sense of self after stepping down from her successful law practice? Mourning the loss of her youthful athletic prowess and attractiveness, what happens when Deanna faces her old friends?

Struggling with two divorces and a failing marriage, can Russell attain peace of mind? How will Max, an expat living in Canada, manage with his incipient dementia? Will the demoralized Keith recover his idealism?

Wrinkled Rebels is a story of how six people achieve meaningful lives through the struggle for social justice. It is also a tale of love, the bonds of friendship, and growing old positively.

A profound and riveting journey through shame and grief, A Hard Silence is, quite simply, unforgettable. Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys

In the mid 1980s, Canada's worst public health disaster was unfolding. Catastrophic mismanagement of the country's blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed nationwide, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV. Among them was Melanie Brooks's surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive.

At a time when HIV/AIDS was widely misunderstood and public perception was shaped by fear, prejudice, and homophobia, victims of the disease faced ostracism and persecution. Afraid of this stigma and wanting to protect his family, Melanie's father decided his illness would be a secret. A secret they'd all have to keep. They did not know that her father would live past that first year, but he did. And for ten years before his death in 1995, from the time she was thirteen until she was twenty-three, Melanie's family lived in the shadow of AIDS. She carried the weight of the uncertain trajectory of her father's health and the heartbreaking anticipation of impending loss silently and alone. It became a way of life.

A Hard Silence is an intimate glimpse into Melanie's memories of coping with the tragedy of her father's illness and enduring the loneliness and isolation of not being able to speak. With candor and vulnerability, Melanie opens her grief wounds and brings her reader inside her journey, twenty years after her father died, to finally understand the consequences of her family's silence, to interrogate the roots of stigma and discrimination responsible for the ongoing secret-keeping, and to show how she's now learned to be authentic.

Debbie's spunk and petulance will drive the reader to laughter despite the tragic circumstances. Dr. Fawzia Mail Tung

January 6, 1994 started as an uneventful day in Debbie's life, but she doesn't remember.

During a late afternoon walk with her two dogs, Debbie's life irrevocably changed when she was hit by a car. The impact threw her into a snow-filled ditch, leaving her unconscious and bleeding from severe brain trauma.

Two months later, Debbie returned home to a world that felt foreign. The lingering effects of her brain injury meant she could never work again. She grappled with permanent memory and mobility issues which reshaped her daily existence.

Despite the long and arduous recovery, Debbie found new purpose in life. She embraced creative writing and devoted herself to volunteer work, such as working in animal shelters and teaching English to refugees. Surviving on disability payments posed its own challenges, but she persevered.

Though her financial situation is strained, Debbie's heart is fuller than ever. The accident, as devastating as it was, forged her into the person she is today. She cherishes the new path her life has taken and wouldn't change a thing. Or would she?

A masterpiece Scott Saalman, author of Vietnam War Love Story

By candlelight, an elderly Korean woman relives her years upended by the Korean War, finding love in the rubble, and her acclimation to 1960 America.

Recently widowed Honey, nee Hanhee, is preparing to move out of her Arlington home when the Virginia earthquake of 2011 hits. Subtly, something in her cracks. Four days later, Hurricane Irene strikes, evoking monsoon-swept streets of yore. With the power out, Honey's life of a half-century ago cinematically comes to light: Her months as an unlikely prostitute at Madam Cho's; her secret revolt against her dead parents whose love was in question; a mysterious monk's prediction; her great, sassy Korean friend Kissuni Kim who dreamed of nothing more than 'love-mak-ing'; her kindly American neighbor Emma Church who would guide her to independence; and, above all, her lingering love for her first husband Joe Lipton, a journalist who brought Honey to America, only to desert her.

Frances Park states that writing Blue Rice was like living a dream from scenes her late mother shared with her, as well as her watercolor-like remembrances of growing up in white America as a small child of war-torn Korean parents.

Reverberates with the drumbeat of why we make art. Will Musgrove, author of Asphalt Dreaming

For Paul, stealing is easy. When he's hungry, he strolls into a bodega and steals lunch. When rent's due, he steals records and flips them for cash. As a lonely kid growing up in Ohio's Rust Belt, stealing was the only way he could score the hip hop records and production equipment that fueled his musical dreams.

Now he's in NYC fighting to keep his once-ascendant band alive and his life from falling apart. His bank account is flatlining. The love of his life has broken his heart. Bunky, his bandmate, is ditching him for Eloise, a soulful vagabond with an intoxicating voice. When financial trouble forces his parents from their lifelong home, Paul ramps up his stealing to save his family from collapse. And in a fever of creativity, he begins to steal from the voices in his life to make the music he's sure will save his soul.

Set against the modern music industry, where a single social post can change your destiny, STATIC is alive to the weight of familial expectations, the pursuit of our deepest hopes and dreams, and the struggle to make meaningful connections in the anxiety of the digital age.

Desperate to find respite from her father's verbal abuse, his various affairs, and her step-mother's psychological torment, Gina spent hours doing Jane Fonda's workouts, smoked cigarettes instead of eating food, and became obsessed with her thinness... with the notion of fading away. She found solace in restlessness-drinking hallucinogenic mushroom tea and inhaling crushed pills and powders-perching herself on the periphery of danger again and again.

Gina soon glimpsed a better life for herself when her grandfather, a man who was a surrogate father to her, became terminally ill. She soon fell in love with John, a stranger who was utterly familiar, but who was addicted to heroin. She moved from New Hampshire to California, crossing the country in an attempt to alleviate her self-destructive tendencies, but found herself pulled back to New Hampshire, to John, a man with whom, despite his struggle, she could not deny the sense of home she felt.

What would it cost for a girl to run wildly and recklessly into womanhood, making instant, temporary homes?

Martha Engber lives a charmed life in the suburbs with a husband and two kids where everything is fine, fine, fine until suddenly she's... completely broken. She's so used to lying to others and herself that she has no idea who she really is or how she feels about anything. What happened? Why is her life smooth driving one minute and totaled the next?

In this sometimes funny, often devastating memoir, Martha describes the arduous journey toward discovering the invisible roadblock that ran her life off course: her psychological distress is the result of being the neurotypical daughter of a dad with undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder, a condition that affects over 75 million people worldwide.

Martha uses personal anecdotes and research about the emergence of ASD as a diagnosis to explain the psychological, emotional and social challenges she faced as a child, then as an adult and parent. Along the way, she shows the sometimes harrowing, but eminently rewarding, route others can follow to chase down the source of their family angst and so reach a more blissful future.

Shocking Valerie Taylor, author of A Whale of a Murder: A Venus Bixby Mystery

Gripping Barbara Claypole White, bestselling author of The Perfect Son

Unforgettable Lisa Towles, award winning author of Salt Island

When Sally unexpectedly becomes a mother at twenty, she tries her best to build a stable life for her son, Morgan. But the sleepless nights, overwhelming isolation, and relentless cries wear her down until she breaks, and in a moment of desperation, she does the unthinkable: she shakes her baby. Consumed by guilt and fear, Sally buries her actions beneath a facade of normalcy, but the cracks are beginning to show.

Enter Alyssa, the teenage babysitter, who is left in charge the night after the incident. As Morgan's condition deteriorates, Sally's partner, Charles, grows increasingly concerned. A series of alarming doctors' visits spiral into a nightmare when authorities are alerted and fingers start pointing at Alyssa. Will Sally come forward and risk losing everything, or will she try to maintain the illusion of being a perfect mother-even if it means someone else takes the blame?

Shaken explores the intense, often unspoken, struggles of new motherhood and the complexities of human fallibility, raising an unsettling question: Does one irreversible mistake define you forever?

Perfect for fans of Jodi Picoult, Lisa Jewell, and Freida McFadden.

This book brought me to tears and a greater understanding of my own possibilities. Terresa Cooper Haskew, author of Winston's Book of Souls

An email from a stranger tells Alison Earley that her natural father, whom she has known for only six years, has died suddenly. What begins as a short trip back to Scotland for a funeral soon becomes a journey that puts adoption, sexuality, and identity on a collision course as Alison finds herself caught between the life and family she has so carefully constructed on one continent and the family from which she was taken on another.

Shunned by her father's family, reunited with her natural mother, and reconnected with a long-lost love, Alison finds herself trying to shepherd her youngest child towards college while questioning everything she thought she knew about herself.

When her natural mother uncovers a series of letters written to Alison from the grandmother she never knew, resurrecting the stories of generations of women-stories long buried by patriarchal rule-Alison realizes that she must find the courage to face and reveal the secrets of her own past. At what cost, though? And who and what will be left in the aftermath?

When the Ocean Flies explores the pain of separation and abuse, and the power of love to heal even over huge gaps in time and geographical distance.

A deeply humane story that lingers long after the last page is turned. Gayle Forman, New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay

As a skyscraper engineer, Jonathan Brooks, has always believed that a skyscraper is either made correctly or incorrectly, and all problems have solutions. He has yet to learn that people are made differently.

When his son Theo fell ill with encephalitis at fourteen months old, he and his wife Carly were devastated to learn that Theo's setbacks would be long-lasting, possibly permanent. Theo is now seven years old and not yet walking or fully verbal, and Jonathan and Carly are living apart. The broken family's world is upturned by the arrival of Aimee, a complicated young Irish woman who begins working as Theo's nanny in ways Jonathan does not trust. But as Aimee brings about new advancements for Theo their bond grows, until Aimee's own personal crisis rocks the family and shows them all a new way forward.

Confuse the Wind is a book about our human interdependence and how we desperately need one another to survive and hopefully thrive.

A kaleidoscopic gem that adeptly showcases how the shameful misdeeds of the past reverberate into modern acts of violence... An emotional tour de force. David Jackson Ambrose, author of Unlawful Disorder

Gabi Keefer flees Holocaust-era Germany with nothing but her husband, her nephew, and the clothes on her back, but that isn't the whole story.

Over generations, her granddaughter, Lena, struggles with drug addiction and an unplanned pregnancy; her sort-of nephew, Zane, grieves for his wife three years after her death in an antisemetic mass shooting; and her great-niece, Miranda, advocates for Palestinian liberation against her family's wishes.

Each character's tale begs the questions: What does it mean to be part of a family, what does it mean to survive, and is that enough?

After three decades of living in the sandy beach suburbs of Huntington Beach, Jon Vreeland's heroin addiction has finally destroyed his once promising music career, and estranged himself from his wife and his two daughters. Now Vreeland broods his daughter's absence while living in his old tour van that is broken down and parked on Atlanta Avenue, on the brink of downtown Huntington Beach. He and his brand new lover and longtime junkie, Zooey Leigh, live in the van and sell and shoot heroin, move from place to place, shift from crime to crime, rob the undeserving in their brazen attempt to escape their hypodermic reality and themselves. But no matter where they go or who they stay with, they always circle back to the shores of Huntington Beach, where the dark nights are their lonely playground. But Jon isn't meant for this life--he wants nothing more than to rid himself of this very real nightmare, and return to his estranged family and career. This is the story of how he began to get out.

As for who reads this book

And who follows its spells

I know your name

You will not die after your death

In Walmart

You will not perish forever

For I know your name

So begins this darkly comic incantation on the gods and scourges of the 21st century. The Walmart Book of the Dead was inspired by the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, funerary texts with accompanying illustrations containing spells to preserve the spirit of the deceased in the afterlife. In Lucy Biederman's version, shoplifters, grifters, drifters, and hustlers, desirous children, greeters, would-be Marxists, wolves, and circuit court judges wander Walmart unknowingly consigned to their afterlives.

This BOOK is for the dark hours, the seam that ties the end of the evening to sunrise, when the bad, wrong things people do in and around Walmart are a hospital infection, red Rit dye in a load of whites, a gun in a classroom: by the time the problem is identified, it's already ruined everything.

At the ripe age of forty, when Alexis Paige was finally diagnosed with ADHD-Inattentive Type, she rolled her eyes even before the doctor could finish spelling out her new marching orders: The goal now, he said, is to learn how to work smart, not hard.

But that doesn't sound like any fun, she said. She was going to have to do this, too-ironically, inexplicably, comically-as she did everything else, the hard way.

Part memoir, part craft guide, Work Hard, Not Smart, shows how Alexis lives her messy literary life. She invites you to step into her mismatched shoes. And if you do, you'll find the writing companion you've been looking for.

A successful radiologist and elite athlete, Dr. Dave tended to the blistered feet of strangers on racecourses and gave away many of his trophies. He was appreciated for his generosity and camaraderie with family, friends, colleagues, and adventure-racing teammates, the latter of whom usually accompanied him on excursions. But he embarked on his final pursuit alone-an attempt to summit all fifty-four of the fourteeners in Colorado-and made an unknowable error that caused him to fall two hundred feet to his death.

When people learned that he had died, they often asked his sister, the only girl and the baby of the family, Were you close? The question, seemingly straightforward, haunted her and begged for a deeper answer, requiring an exploration that took a decade. She invites the reader along on her own journey as she searches for a greater understanding about who her brother was, why his passions were worth risking everything, and how to carry on in the world and in her family without him, ultimately becoming even closer to him in death than in life.

Were You Close? challenges the cultural notion that the bereaved can or should simply get over their losses, illustrating that integrating these experiences can actually help a mourner not just heal, but move forward with clarified purpose.