Heartbroke

From the acclaimed author of Godshot and “a pitch-perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity” (T Kira Madden) comes a defining book of Californian stories where everyone is seeking or sabotaging love United by the stark and sprawling landscapes of California’s Central Valley, the characters of Heartbroke boil with reckless desire. A woman steals a baby from a shelter in an attempt to recoup her own lost motherhood. A phone-sex operator sees divine opportunity when a lavender-eyed cowboy walks into her life. A mother and a son selling dream catchers along a highway that leads to a toxic beach manifest two young documentary filmmakers into their realm. And two teenage girls play a dangerous online game with destiny. Heartbroke brims over with each character’s attempt to salvage grace where they can find it. Told in bright, snapping prose that reveals a world of loss and love underneath, Chelsea Bieker brilliantly illuminates a golden yet gothic world of longing and abandonment under an unrelenting California sun.

While Kate pens an evocative historical novel based on family journals, her neighbor, Emily, flees a volatile relationship to an island in the Adirondacks where she, Kate, and Kate's mother, Birdie, face the consequences of their pasts.

A scientist obsessed with evolution but unable to have children, a malaria researcher trying to choose between freedom and love, and a washed-up TV svengali whose life goes into free fall—The Heart Broke In follows these characters through a riveting exploration of what conscience means in the 21st century, and how we attempt to make our lives count for something. It is a glorious drama, as well as an old-fashioned tale of modern times. When Bec Shepherd rejects marriage to a powerful newspaper editor in favour of starting a family with fellow scientist Alex, her sense of right and wrong is put to the test. Bec’s brother Ritchie has built a hugely successful career in entertainment, but allegations about his private life are threatening to destroy his marriage, his career and his mind. Does Bec and Alex’s relationship stand a chance? Will Ritchie’s indiscretion catch up with him?

“Imagine if Annie Proulx wrote something like White Oleander crossed with Geek Love or Cruddy, and then add cults, God, motherhood, girlhood, class, deserts, witches, the divinity of women . . . Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed." —T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen–year–old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for. Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances. Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother–loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own. “[A] haunting debut . . . This is a harrowing tale, which Bieker smartly writes through the lens of a teenager on the cusp of understanding the often fraught relationship between religion and sexuality . . . It's a timely and disturbing portrait of how easily men can take advantage of vulnerable women—and the consequences sink in more deeply with each page."—Annabel Gutterman, Time “Drawn in brilliant, bizarre detail—baptism in warm soda, wisdom from romance novels—Lacey's twin crises of faith and femininity tangle powerfully. Fiercely written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend. A–.”—Mary Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly

Kristine Carlson had an idyllic life. She and her husband, Richard, had a romantic marriage, two beautiful daughters, and—thanks to the success of Richard's bestselling Don't Sweat the Small Stuff series—all the comforts of the American Dream. But on December 13, 2006, that perfect story took a sudden turn when, on a typical flight to New York, a pulmonary embolism would take Richard's life, catapulting Kristine into heartbreak and uncertainty. It was the end of life as Kristine knew it and the beginning of a journey through the depths of grief and mourning that would reveal to Kristine her true strength and an immeasurable love that cannot be broken. This book is a courageously honest memoir. It is the true story of a wife, a mother, a woman forced to come face-to-face with fear, insecurity, and the painful but ultimately precious teachings Kristine Carlson discovered along the way. This wise little book offers a timeless message of inspiration, empowerment, and courage for anyone who has experienced loss or hardship of any kind.

From James Meek, the award-winning author of the international bestseller The People's Act of Love, comes a rich and intricate novel about everything that matters to us now: children, celebrity, secrets and shame, the quest for youth, loyalty and betrayal, falls from grace, acts of terror, and the wonderful, terrible inescapability of family. Ritchie Shepherd, an aging pop star and a producer of a reality show for teen talent, is starting to trip over his own lies. Maybe filming a documentary about his father, Captain Shepherd, a British soldier executed by Northern Irish guerrillas, will redeem him. His sister, Bec, is getting closer and closer to a vaccine for malaria. When she's not in Tanzania harvesting field samples, she's peering through a microscope at her own blood to chart the risky treatment she's testing on herself. She's as addicted to honesty as Ritchie is to trickery. Val Oatman is the editor of a powerful tabloid newspaper. The self-appointed conscience of the nation, scourge of hypocrites and cheats, he believes he will marry beautiful Bec. Alex Comrie, a gene therapist (and formerly the drummer in Ritchie's band), is battling his mortally ill uncle, a brilliant and domineering scientist, over whether Alex might actually have discovered a cure for aging. Alex, too, believes he will marry Bec. Colum O'Donabháin has just been released from prison, having served a twenty-five-year sentence for putting a gun to Captain Shepherd's head when he refused to give up an informer. He now writes poetry. Their stories meet and tangle in this bighearted epic that is also shrewd, starkly funny, and utterly of the moment. The Heart Broke In is fiction with the reverberating resonance of truth.

"The Heartbroken of a Lovelorn and the Lovely Dovey" is almost a flashback romantic story of fate. The salient context revolves around two businessmen who own a great commercial enterprise together. They love each other and conceive the idea of extending their precious relationship to their future generations, creating a fraught and heartrending relationship through this plan. It is a school lifestyle story that recalls the memories of your childhood, early developmental years, and the overgrown youthful exuberance of a love affair. It is a book of enlightenment filled with wisdom, providing insight for the young, old, and teenagers in terms of decision-making. The book delves into the philosophy of love from its beginnings to its end. It emphasizes and reveals the psychology behind love and attention-seeking behavior among individuals of the opposite sex. It is a guide that navigates through the stages of maturing, offering advice, making choices, showing determination, experiencing intense passions, idolizing emotional storms, deep feelings, strong attractions, falling deeply, being enchanted, and struck by desires of love without any logical reasoning, ultimately resulting in a broken heart.

'Arresting and vivid, raw and breathtaking...told with stunning originality' DOLLY ALDERTON 'Annie Lord tells us a story at once both specific and universal' SHON FAYE 'An electrifying debut' CAROLINE O'DONOGHUE Dark, fierce and raw, Notes on Heartbreak is a love story told in reverse... Reeling from a broken heart, Annie Lord revisits the past - from the moment she first fell in love, the shared in-jokes and intertwining of a long-term relationship, to the months that saw the slow erosion of a bond five years in the making. Charting her attempts to move on, Annie explores the ups and downs of being newly single, from disastrous rebound sex to sending ill-advised nudes, stalking your ex's new girlfriend on Instagram and the sharp indignity of being ghosted. This stunning exploration of love and heartbreak from cult journalist and Vogue columnist Annie Lord, is so much more than a book about one singular break-up. it is an unflinchingly honest account of the simultaneous joy and pain of being in love that will resonate with anyone who has ever nursed a broken heart. It's a book about the best and worst of love: the euphoric and the painful, the beautiful and the messy. Perfect for fans of Everything I Know About Love, Conversations on Love and Three Women.

Imagine if we treated broken hearts with the same respect and concern we have for broken arms? Psychologist Guy Winch urges us to rethink the way we deal with emotional pain, offering warm, wise, and witty advice for the broken-hearted. Real heartbreak is unmistakable. We think of nothing else. We feel nothing else. We care about nothing else. Yet while we wouldn’t expect someone to return to daily activities immediately after suffering a broken limb, heartbroken people are expected to function normally in their lives, despite the emotional pain they feel. Now psychologist Guy Winch imagines how different things would be if we paid more attention to this unique emotion—if only we can understand how heartbreak works, we can begin to fix it. Through compelling research and new scientific studies, Winch reveals how and why heartbreak impacts our brain and our behavior in dramatic and unexpected ways, regardless of our age. Emotional pain lowers our ability to reason, to think creatively, to problem solve, and to function at our best. In How to Fix a Broken Heart he focuses on two types of emotional pain—romantic heartbreak and the heartbreak that results from the loss of a cherished pet. These experiences are both accompanied by severe grief responses, yet they are not deemed as important as, for example, a formal divorce or the loss of a close relative. As a result, we are often deprived of the recognition, support, and compassion afforded to those whose heartbreak is considered more significant. Our heart might be broken, but we do not have to break with it. Winch reveals that recovering from heartbreak always starts with a decision, a determination to move on when our mind is fighting to keep us stuck. We can take control of our lives and our minds and put ourselves on the path to healing. Winch offers a toolkit on how to handle and cope with a broken heart and how to, eventually, move on.

A powerful literary debut inspired by a true story. In 1898, Alaska is an untamed wilderness with an unforgiving climate. At the tail end of a world-wide depression, thousands of destitute people are drawn north by rumors of easy wealth coming out of the remote claims of the Gold Rush. Many of the pilgrims are unprepared for the hardships that await them and find nothing but a desolate landscape already pillaged of its riches by those who came before. Hannah Nelson, a beautiful young Englishwoman, is one of the late arrivals. After following her husband to a glacier-wracked fjord in the company of three equally desperate men, she discovers that gold is only one of the desires that can consume a person's soul...