"Life changes in an instant. On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and his younger brother Nicholas are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. One moment he's there, the next he's gone. Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral, and incredibly the family returns immediately to the same cottage - to complete the holiday, to carry on, in the best British tradition. They soon stop speaking of the...

When Tony Hillerman looks back at seventy-six years spent getting from hard times farm boy to bestselling author, he sees lots of evidence that Providence was poking him along. For example, when an absentminded Army clerk left him off the hospital ship taking the wounded home from France, the mishap put him on a collision course with a curing ceremony held for two Navajo Marines, thereby providing the grist for a writing career that now sees his books...

"From a bracingly beautiful new voice comes this life-affirming memoir of a daughter making and remaking her life in her mother's image. Sifting gingerly through memories of her late mother, brilliant newcomer Sarah McColl has penned a breathtaking tribute to the joy and pain of loving well. Even as her own marriage splinters, McColl drops everything when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, returning to the family farmhouse and laboring over elaborate...

Patrick McManus, the bestselling author of such hilarious books as A Fine and Pleasant Misery and Never Sniff a Gift Fish, now offers readers solid thoughts on the qualities that define leadership, beginning with the need to be tall, and much more, in this outrageous collection of short pieces that reveals his tortuous trip along the writer's path.

I wasn't afraid of death. How could I be? I lived under death's shadow every day. When you swallow eighty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined in dollar amounts, but in the amounts your body can withstand without...

"In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid...

Continues the memoirs of Yorkshire veterinarian James Herriot, as life for Herriot, his wife, and two children gets back to normal after World War II.

Veterinarian Herriot continues his delightful recollections of his work among the animals & people of the Yorkshire Dales in the 1950s.

For Julia Pandl, the rite of passage into young-adulthood included mandatory service at her family's restaurant, where she watched as her father-who was also the chef-ruled with the strictness of a drill sergeant. At age twelve, Julie was initiated into the rite of the Sunday brunch, a weekly madhouse at her father's Milwaukee-based restaurant, where she and her eight older siblings before her did service in a situation of controlled chaos, learning...

"In 2018, Shaun Bythell's The Diary of a Bookseller (soon to be a major U.K. TV series) introduced readers to the joys and frustrations of his life as the owner of The Bookshop, the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland. Now, Confessions of a Bookseller, sardonic and sympathetic in equal measure, returns to chart the highs and lows of another year in the life of a cantankerous-yet-lovable man passionate about books"-- Provided by publisher.