A beautiful young woman. An American soldier. A war-torn country. Nearly forty years of silence. Now, two daughters search for the truth they hope will set them free and the elusive peace their parents have never found. In the South Carolina Lowcountry, a young mother named Katherine Ann is struggling to help her tempestuous father by plunging into a world of secrets he never talks about. A fry cook named Lisa is trying desperately to reach her grieving Vietnamese mother who has never fully adjusted to life in the States. And somewhere far away, a lost soul named Ernest is drifting, treading water, searching for what he lost on a long-ago mountain. They're all yearning for connection. For the war that touched them to finally end. For their hundred years of happiness at long last to begin. From the beloved author of The Spirit of Sweetgrass and Trouble the Water comes this generous story of family, war, loss, and longing . . . of the ways we hide from those we love, and the ways that love finds us anyway.

'Charming, touching, surprising and ultimately uplifting. Funny, moving . . . I defy anyone to finish this story without tears in their eyes' Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project 'Hilarious but heart-wrenching' Daily Mail What would you do if you only had 100 days left to live? Lucio Battistini has a list: To win back his wife - the love of his life To become a dad his kids will always remember To help his father-in-law find love To let his friends know how much they mean to him And most of all he must make every moment count. So far, he hasn't been getting it right. And if Lucio is going to become the man he was always meant to be, he's got a lot of work to do . . .

'I'm too busy to be happy . . .' Do you ever think like this? Many of us do these days, says psychologist and happiness expert Dr Timothy Sharp. In our quest for better jobs, bigger houses, more exotic holidays and higher-performing children, we have become too busy to factor in the one component that will make all of the above worthwhile: happiness. The good news is that achieving happiness is not a herculean task. It doesn't require expensive therapy or years of self-examination. Oftern it is about fine-tuning our thoughts and putting in place some simple daily practices. Dr Sharp draws on the latest research into the science of happiness and presents it here in 100 bite-sized chunks of inspiration and instruction. Read it from cover to cover, or dip in and out for a regular dose of happiness training. Learn how to increase your happiness levels by: improving your physical healthcounting your blessingsnurturing positive relationships becoming a giverbetter managing your time.Accessible, informative and funny, 100 Ways to Happiness encourages us to regard happiness as something that is achievable, manageable and hugely enhancing to the lives we live now.

Sandee Sgarlata was twelve years old and could not have been happier as she climbed the one hundred steps from the river dock to her house, only to learn her older brother had tragically died while serving in the US Army. It was just one of the defining moments in her life. Facing death has been the underlying theme of her life and the catalyst for her never-ending search and desire to learn how to maintain a sense of peace and happiness. In Happiness Solved, Sgarlata shares her no-nonsense approach to create lasting change. No matter what you’ve experienced and no matter what your daily struggles are, you can learn to achieve a state of peace and happiness. From the moment she learned about her brother’s death, Sgarlata began her quest to return to that place of happiness she felt at the age of twelve. In Happiness Solved, she delivers the message that there is no guarantee how long you have left. Your life will pass you by in a split second. How do you want to spend every day while you’re still here? Life is too short to delay the climb.

When a man discovers his father in New York has long had another, secret, family—a wife and two kids—the interlocking fates of both families lead to surprise loyalties, love triangles, and a reservoir of inner strength—"It would be impossible to overstate just how good this book is" (Ann Patchett). Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family—a Thai wife and two kids living in Queens. In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan's mother spends a year working abroad, returning much changed, as events introduce her to the other wife. Across town, Ethan's half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother's penchant for minor delinquency has escalated, and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother has struck about love and money continue to shape their lives. As Ethan finds himself caught in a love triangle of his own, the interwoven fates of these two households elegantly unfurl to encompass a woman rallying to help an ill brother with an unreliable lover and a filmmaker with a girlhood spent in Nepal. Evoking a generous and humane spirit, and a story that ranges over three continents, Secrets of Happiness elucidates the ways people marshal the resources at hand to forge their own forms of joy.

An intellectual history of man's most elusive yet coveted goal. Today, we think of happiness as a natural right, but people haven't always felt this way. Historian McMahon argues that our modern belief in happiness is a recent development, the product of a revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century. He investigates that fundamental transformation by synthesizing two thousand years of politics, culture, and thought. In ancient Greek tragedy, happiness was considered a gift of the gods. During the Enlightenment men and women were first introduced to the novel prospect that they could--in fact should--be happy in this life as opposed to the hereafter. This recognition of happiness as a motivating ideal led to its consecration in the Declaration of Independence. McMahon then shows how our modern search continues to generate new forms of pleasure, but also, paradoxically, new forms of pain.--From publisher description.