Oceans Apart

A riveting story of secret sin and the healing power of forgiveness. Airline pilot Connor Evans and his wife, Michele, seem to be the perfect couple living what looks like a perfect life. Then a plane goes down in the Pacific Ocean. One of the casualties is Kiahna Siefert, a flight attendant Connor knew well. Too well. Kiahna's will is very clear: before her seven-year-old son, Max, can be turned over to the state, he must spend the summer with the father he's never met, the father who doesn't know he exists: Connor Evans. Now will the presence of one lonely child and the truth he represents destroy Connor's family ? Or is it possible that healing and hope might come in the shape of a seven-year-old boy?

A forgotten secret. A shocking discovery. A sacrifice of love that will bring Connor Evans to his knees. A story of hope and redemption from #1 New York Times bestselling author Karen Kingsbury. Airline pilot Connor Evans and his wife, Michele, seem to be the perfect couple living what looks like a perfect life. Then a plane goes down in the Pacific Ocean. One of the casualties is Kiahna Siefert, a flight attendant Connor knew well. Too well. Kiahna’s will is very clear: before her seven-year-old son, Max, can be turned over to the state, he must spend the summer with the father he’s never met, the father who doesn’t know he exists: Connor Evans. Now will the presence of one lonely child and the truth he represents destroy Connor’s family? Or is it possible for healing and hope to appear in the shape of a seven-year-old boy? “[Kingsbury’s] ability to accurately express life’s sorrows and grief through her characters’ inner dialogue rings true time and again.” —Publishers Weekly on Every Now & Then “Her emotionally charged novels often contain a strong romantic component and feature Christians at odds with their everyday world. This title is no exception. Recommend this one to readers who enjoy well-drawn characters and contemporary settings.” —Library Journal on The Baxters Take Four

From May 1940, the Children’s Overseas Reception Board began to move children to Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand for their own safety during the Second World War. The scheme was extremely popular, and over 200,000 applications were made within just four months, while thousands of children were also sent to be privately evacuated overseas. The ‘sea-vacs’, as they became known, had a variety of experiences. After weeks at sea, they began new lives thousands of miles away. Letters home took up to twelve weeks to reach their destination, and many children were totally cut off from their families in the UK. While most were well cared for, others found their time abroad a miserable, difficult or frightening experience as they encountered homesickness, prejudice and even abuse. Using a range of primary source material, including diaries, letters and interviews, Penny Starns reveals in heart-breaking detail the unique and personal experiences of sea-vacs, as well as their surprising influence on international wartime policy in their power to elicit international sympathy and financial support for the British war effort.

The first victim, Phil Lyons, is an apparent suicide in a posh Santa Monica hotel. When a second body is discovered a few days later, Zuma sees more than a coincidental connection. Soon a trail of bodies leads Zuma from California to Las Vegas and finally to Mexico. Along the way, he crosses paths with a married woman who has two lovers, a Vegas landlord, a waitress at an upscale casino, a husband plagued by guilt, and drug dealers. Recovering from the death of his beloved wife, Detective Joe Zuma of the 25th Precinct of the Santa Monica Police Department has just come back from his much-needed annual vacation in Cape Cod. He thinks he might even be ready to start dating again—only to find himself immersed instead in a series of mysterious deaths. Oceans Apart is the exciting tale of a police detective’s quest for justice as he tries to unravel a series of mysterious deaths.

'A beautiful story of friendship, new beginnings and love . . . It's a love letter to the women who left behind everything to help heal our country and establish the NHS. I could not have loved this more and thought about it long after I turned the last page.' - Kate Thompson, author of The Little Wartime Library Inspired by real life stories of the Windrush Generation and her mother’s own experiences as a nurse coming to Britain from the Caribbean, Sarah Lee’s debut novel An Ocean Apart is a must for fans of Call the Midwife. It’s 1954 and, in Barbados, Ruby Haynes spots an advertisement for young women to train as nurses for the new National Health Service in Great Britain. Her sister, Connie, takes some persuading, but soon the sisters are on their way to a new country – and a whole new world of experiences. As they start their training in Hertfordshire, they discover England isn’t quite the promised land; for every door that’s opened to them, the sisters find many slammed in their faces. And though the girls find friendships with their fellow nurses, Connie struggles with being so far from home, and keeping secret the daughter she has left behind in search of a better life for the both of them . . . 'A glorious triumph of a book full of characters that feel like real friends, so atmospheric, compelling and nostalgic, I adored it.' - Alex Brown, author of A Postcard from Italy

This work takes readers to two countries ravaged by World War II, Poland and Japan, recounting the wartime experiences of teenagers Bogdan and Seiko. Bogdan's family abandoned its home in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and fled to Warsaw, where Bogdan fought for the Polish Home Army in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. During this brutal conflict, as Poles tried to oust occupying Germans, Bogdan sustained severe injuries, and after the Germans crushed the Uprising, he endured seven POW camps. On the other side of the globe, in Hokkaido, Japan, Seiko's country went to war against the U.S. With school suspended, Seiko worked in a wartime factory. Her older sister died during the war, while her older brother trained as a kamikaze pilot. Once the war ended, both Bogdan and Seiko immigrated to the U.S. to pursue educational opportunities. In bustling postwar New York City, they met, fell in love, and then started a family. Bogdan and Seiko's story is one of hope, symbolizing recovery from war's devastation and immigrants' dreams of new lives in America.

In spring of 1940 something special happened in the Danville Community School in Iowa. Teacher Birdie Mathews offered her students the chance to correspond with pen pals overseas. A student named Juanita Wagner drew the name of a ten-year-old girl in the Netherlands-Anne Frank. The brief connection between Anne Frank in Amsterdam and Iowa was the work of Birdie Mathews. Mathews was a veteran teacher who had taught for over two decades in country schools. She taught a wide range of curriculum and varying ages and levels of students. No doubt this had made her a seasoned teacher who had overcome the obstacles that plagued rural teachers. "Miss Birdie" acquired teaching resources through travel. She was even a bit of a local celebrity when she sent home lengthy letters to the local newspaper sharing stories of her 1914 trip to Europe. Her letters were front-page news, and her travel experiences became classroom lesson plans. Her students often spent afternoons gathering around Mathews to hear about her adventures. In order to open their eyes to the world beyond, she frequently sent postcards to her students from her travels overseas and across the country. On one of these trips she acquired the names of potential pen pals for her students. Having pen-pals in the classroom was rare at this time. Only creative teachers would have set up situations in which their students could learn first-hand about the world. Some Danville students wrote to other children in the United States, but many, including Juanita Wagner, chose to write to overseas pen pals. In her introductory letter in the spring of 1940, Juanita, age ten, wrote about Iowa, her mother (a teacher), sister Betty Ann, life on their farm and in nearby Danville. She sealed the letter and sent it to Anne Frank in Amsterdam. In a few weeks, Juanita received not one, but two overseas letters. Anne had written back to Juanita. Anne's sister Margot wrote to sister Betty Ann since both girls were fourteen. "It was such a special joy as a child to have the experience of receiving a letter from a pen pal overseas," Betty Ann Wagner later recalled. "In those days we had no TV, little radio, and maybe a newspaper once or twice a week. Living on a farm with so little communication could be very dull except for all the good books from the library." The Frank sisters' letters from Amsterdam were dated April 27, 1940 and April 29, 1940 and were written in ink on light blue stationary. Anne and Margot had enclosed their school pictures. The letters were in English, but experts believe that the Frank sisters composed their letters first in Dutch and then copied them over in English after their father, Otto Frank, translated them. In her letter Anne told of her family, her Montessori school, and Amsterdam. She must have pulled out a map of the United States because she wrote, "On the map I looked again and found the name Burlington." Enclosing a postcard of Amsterdam, she mentioned her hobby of picture-card collecting. "I have already about 800." After the war was over, Betty Ann Wagner was teaching in a country school in eastern Illinois. Still curious about the Dutch pen pals, she wrote again to Anne's address in Amsterdam. A few months later she received a long, handwritten letter from Otto Frank. He told about the family hiding, of Anne's experiences in the "secret annex" and how Anne had died in a concentration camp. This was the first time Betty Ann learned that Anne was Jewish. "When I received the letter, I shed tears," Betty Ann recalled. "The next day I took it with me to school and read Otto Frank's letter to my students. I wanted them to realize how fortunate they were to be in America during World War II."

With over 400,000 books already in print, the Dear Canada series has fast become the book series for children. Each fictional diary invites readers into the world of a girl living through a particular period in Canada's past. Gillian Chan's latest addition illustrates the effect the Chinese Head Tax has on one young girl and her family. Mei-ling and her father are struggling to pay the head tax that will allow her mother and brother, who are still living in China, to come to Canada. They must have that money before the impending Exclusion Act bars any more Chinese from immigrating. What will happen if they can't come up with enough in time to reunite their family?

Much of human experience can be distilled to saltwater: tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. In Vast Expanses, Helen M. Rozwadowski weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical history of that relationship, a journey of tides and titanic forces reaching around the globe and across geological and evolutionary time. Our ancient connections with the sea have developed and multiplied through industrialization and globalization, a trajectory that runs counter to Western depictions of the ocean as a place remote from and immune to human influence. Rozwadowski argues that knowledge about the oceans—created through work and play, scientific investigation, and also through human ambitions for profiting from the sea—has played a central role in defining our relationship with this vast, trackless, and opaque place. It has helped us to exploit marine resources, control ocean space, extend imperial or national power, and attempt to refashion the sea into a more tractable arena for human activity. But while deepening knowledge of the ocean has animated and strengthened connections between people and the world’s seas, to understand this history we must address questions of how, by whom, and why knowledge of the ocean was created and used—and how we create and use this knowledge today. Only then can we can forge a healthier relationship with our future sea.