IS THERE A WARNING BEFORE THE MOMENT LIFE SHATTERS INTO PIECES? In 1968 two young Vietnamese sisters flee to Saigon after their village on the Mekong River is attacked by American forces and burned to the ground. The sole survivors of the brutal massacre that killed their family, the sisters struggle to survive but become estranged, separated by sharply different choices and ideologies. Mai ekes out a living as a GI bar girl, but Tam’s anger festers, and she heads into jungle terrain to fight with the Viet Cong. For nearly ten years, neither sister knows if the other is alive. Do they both survive the war? And if they do, can they mend their fractured relationship? Or are the wounds from their journeys too deep to heal? In a stunning departure from her crime thrillers, Libby Fischer Hellmann delves into a universal story about survival, family, and the consequences of war.

Fall in love with this small-town love story about a widower sheriff and a divorced schoolteacher who are searching for second chances -- only to be threatened by long-held secrets of the past. Miles Ryan's life seemed to end the day his wife was killed in a hit-and-run accident two years ago. As deputy sheriff of New Bern, North Carolina, he not only grieves for her and worries about their young son Jonah but longs to bring the unknown driver to justice. Then Miles meets Sarah Andrews, Jonah's second-grade teacher. A young woman recovering from a difficult divorce, Sarah moved to New Bern hoping to start over. Tentatively, Miles and Sarah reach out to each other...soon they are falling in love. But what neither realizes is that they are also bound together by a shocking secret, one that will force them to reexamine everything they believe in-including their love.

This book provides a detailed account of what camp meeting was (and still is) like with a daily log that covers every major event and service. This account includes summaries of sermons delivered by its presidents and evangelists of the past and present, an abundance of photographs culled from archives, and three appendices containing a record of past presidents, a year-by-year roster of camp officers, platform speakers, and other camp workers, along with the transcript of a sermon delivered by President W. G. Nixon in 1926. This book is more than just a history of a Wesleyan holiness camp meeting; it is a rich narrative of temporal and eternal things that will ignite the reader's imagination of what God has done through the sanctified lives of those whose goal was to provide a place where the call to holiness would be preached and an invitation given for all to be filled with the Holy Spirit enabling them to love God with all their heart, mind, and soul, and their neighbor as themselves. At the very least, this book is a reminder of life's greatest value and the reason for being.This book provides a detailed account of what camp meeting was (and still is) like with a daily log that covers every major event and service. This account includes summaries of sermons delivered by its presidents and evangelists of the past and present, an abundance of photographs culled from archives, and three appendices containing a record of past presidents, a year-by-year roster of camp officers, platform speakers, and other camp workers, along with the transcript of a sermon delivered by President W. G. Nixon in 1926. This book is more than just a history of a Wesleyan holiness camp meeting; it is a rich narrative of temporal and eternal things that will ignite the reader's imagination of what God has done through the sanctified lives of those whose goal was to provide a place where the call to holiness would be preached and an invitation given for all to be filled with the Holy Spirit enabling them to love God with all their heart, mind, and soul, and their neighbor as themselves. At the very least, this book is a reminder of life's greatest value and the reason for bei

As a mother-less child, beautiful Haven Stunham never could find her place in small-town Alabama, having grown up on the riverbanks with an uneducated father and a housekeeper determined to mold her with Old Testament scripture. After graduation, she shakes off her hometown like a fur coat in July and doesn't stop until she runs out of gas on the flipside of Georgia. While life is good in Sweetgrass, destiny waits for her back home. When she returns to Sugar Bend years later to bury her father, the harsh memories begin to soften around the edges. And amidst the emotion of reconciliation, she makes a choice that will change her life as well as her eternity. God uses the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy and the ultimate sickness of her young daughter to demonstrate that Jesus is found in more places than a church pew. He's even found where the river bends. Christy Kyser Truitt has lived in the Deep South her entire life and always near a river. The Demopolis, AL, native currently resides in Auburn, AL, with her husband Brian and four children. She is a graduate of Auburn University where she proudly wore her blue jeans with her pearls as a Kappa Delta. Following a career in banking, Christy is currently a public speaker and uses her journalism degree to write full-time. Her first novel, Serenity Point, was published in 2006.

In the summer of 1997 renowned nature photographer C. C. Lockwood embarked on a remarkable adventure. First by canoe and then by Grand Canyon–style pontoon raft, he journeyed the length of the Mississippi River—2,320 miles—from its source at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico. Armed with his camera and computer equipment to transmit stories and pictures to schoolchildren, this “High Tech Huck Finn” trained his lens on spectacular scenes, creating images that vividly depict the life pulsing in and near this vital American artery—water and lands that touch the lives of every American. As Lockwood shows in these brilliant color photographs, the river has many faces. At its birthplace it is nothing more than a trickle among rocks. But as it serpentines south, it slowly grows until, at its end, it pours daily over 420 billion gallons of water into the Gulf of Mexico. Lockwood captures the river in all of its moods: a ghostly foggy morning on the bank; a bright orange sunset over the bends; a quiet snowfall at the headwaters; a sudden rain shower at dusk. He also offers intimate images of the creatures that make their home in the river or along its shores: a whitetail fawn nestled in underbrush; a curious frog peeking out from beneath reeds; a Canada goose marching in line with her goslings; turtles burying themselves in mud. His depiction of the natural beauty of Old Man River is unparalleled. The river comes to appear as a thriving community because Lockwood introduces the people, both ordinary and extraordinary, who live and journey on it. We meet, among others, a performance artist intent on swimming the river’s length; inhabitants of a makeshift houseboat colony near Winona, Minnesota; Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher look-alikes in Hannibal, Missouri; and Willie P., who, with the help of thirty-gallon plastic barrels and paddle wheels, employs a most unusual mode of river transportation—a Toyota Celica hatchback. To illustrate the changing riverscape, Lockwood includes images of some of the businesses and industries that line the river’s banks: casino river boats glittering in the night; the jumping blues clubs of Memphis’ Beale Street; bustling industrial plants and the countless barges and push boats that service them. He also offers a detailed memoir of his trip, as well as his other tours of the river by plane, car, tugboat, and river boat, in a delightful introduction. Lockwood’s photographs depict beautifully the varied aspects of the Mississippi River—flourishing community, vital industrial corridor, and priceless environmental treasure. Through this book, readers can join him on his quest to discover the wonders that lie just “around the bend.”

One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.