"After the tragic loss of his wife, Helen, Luke Hansard is desperate to keep her memory alive. In an effort to stay close to her, he reaches out to an online friend Helen often mentioned - a reclusive photographer with a curious interest in beautiful but broken objects. But first he must find her - and she doesn't want to be found. Orla Kendrick lives alone in the ruins of a remote Suffolk castle, hiding from the haunting past that has left her physically...

"Hollis Bragg lives on the fringes. The hunchbacked son of a West Virginia hill preacher, he now resides in rural isolation next to the burned-out husk of his father's church, and earns his living ghostwriting songs for a popular band that left the poverty and corruption of Appalachia and never looked back. It's the life he prefers, free from the harsh glare of the spotlight and attachments that lead only to heartbreak. Then, much to his consternation,...

Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. She finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur'an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she's crazy, but she is no fool--the madness is in the battered city around...

Poison in the Air, Jabbour Douaihy's final novel, chronicles the decades of social, political, and economic turmoil leading up to and including the recent collapse of his beloved Lebanon after the horrific explosion that occurred at the Port of Beirut in 2020. Douaihy brings a multitude of bottled-up toxicity to the surface, as though he is writing his last letter to the world, or a suicide note for Lebanon, as he paints a picture of a society marching...

Dr James Darke has expelled himself from the world. He writes compulsively in his 'coming of old age' journal; he eats little, drinks and smokes a lot. Meditating on what he has lost - the loves of his life, both dead and alive - he tries to console himself with the wisdom of the great thinkers and poets, yet finds nothing but disappointment. But cracks of light appear in his carefully managed darkness; he begins to emerge from his self-imposed exile,...

Lovely and Beauty know their place: at home, beneath the watchful eye of their mother. Life has never included friends, an education, or anything the sisters can call their own. Their comings and goings are supervised by Farida. Otherwise, they don't come and go at all. That changes on Lovely's fortieth birthday. In a stroke of inexplicable fortune, Farida permits her eldest daughter to go to the Gausia Market alone, with no instructions but to abide...

"The world has changed around Missy Carmichael. At seventy-nine, she's estranged from her daughter, her son and only grandson live across the world in Australia, and her great love is gone. Missy spends her days with a sip of sherry, scrubbing the kitchen in her big empty house and reliving her past--though it's her mistakes, and secrets, that she allows to shine brightest. The last thing Missy expects is for two perfect strangers and one spirited...