The Absence Of Nectar

Eleven-year-old Alice believes if she could get rid of her new stepfather, Simon, things would be as sweet as before. No one wants to believe that the pieces of his tragic past don't fit together--or that he's trying to poison Alice and her older brother. Until the one night her mother comes to kiss her goodnight and instead whispers a single word--"Run!"

In an obsessive attempt to protect her son from the innumerable dangers of the world, Martha kidnaps him and hides in an isolated cave before reluctantly befriending a detective who has been hired to bring them back home.

During the Civil War, a plantation owner's wife is arrested by her husband and declared insane for seeking justice for slaves. She is sent to a mental asylum and finds love with a war-haunted Confederate soldier.

Pia has always known her destiny. She is meant to start a new race, a line of descendants who will bring an end to death. She has been bred for no other purpose, genetically engineered to be immortal and raised by a team of scientists in a secret compound hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest. Now those scientists have begun to challenge her, with the goal of training her to carry on their dangerous work. For as long as she can remember, Pia’s greatest desire has been to fulfill their expectations. But then one night she finds a hole in the impenetrable fence that surrounds her sterile home. Free in the jungle for the first time in her life, Pia meets Eio, a boy from a nearby village. Unable to resist, she continues sneaking out to see him. As they fall in love, they begin to piece together the truth about Pia’s origin—a truth with nothing less than deadly consequences that will change their lives forever. Origin is a beautifully told, electric new way to look at an age-old desire: to live forever. But is eternal life worth living if you can’t spend it with the one you love?

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick! • A bighearted novel with technicolor characters, plenty of Texas swagger, and a powder keg of a plot in which marriages struggle, rivalries flare, and secrets explode, all with a clever wink toward classical mythology. For fans of Madeline Miller's Circe: "The Iliad meets Friday Night Lights in this muscular, captivating debut" (Oprah Daily). The Briscoe family is once again the talk of their small town when March returns to East Texas two years after he was caught having an affair with his brother's wife. His mother, June, hardly welcomes him back with open arms. Her husband's own past affairs have made her tired of being the long-suffering spouse. Is it, perhaps, time for a change? Within days of March's arrival, someone is dead, marriages are upended, and even the strongest of alliances are shattered. In the end, the ties that hold them together might be exactly what drag them all down. An expansive tour de force, Olympus, Texas cleverly weaves elements of classical mythology into a thoroughly modern family saga, rich in drama and psychological complexity. After all, at some point, don't we all wonder: What good is this destructive force we call love?

For readers of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, Joshilyn Jackson, and Fannie Flagg, with a touch of Terms of Endearment A laugh-out-loud funny yet poignant novel about a daughter determined not only to keep her mother among the living but to find out the secrets of her long-buried past Willow Havens is ten years old and obsessed with the fear that her mother will die. Her mother, Polly, is a cantankerous, take-no-prisoners Southern woman who lives to shoot varmints, drink margaritas, and antagonize the neighbors--and she sticks out like a sore thumb among the young, modern mothers of their small conventional Texas town. She was in her late fifties when Willow was born, so Willow knows she's here by accident, a late-life afterthought. Willow's father died before she was born, her much older brother and sister are long grown and gone and failing elsewhere: it's just her and her bigger-than-life mom, Polly. Willow is desperately hungry for clues to the family life that preceded her, and Polly has her own secrets that she won't reveal. Why did she leave her hometown of Bethel, Louisiana, fifty years ago and vow never to return after a mysterious and terrible incident? Who is Garland Jones, her long-ago suitor who possibly killed a man? And will Polly be able to outrun The Bear, the illness that finally puts her on a collision course with her closely guarded past and a final trip back to Bethel that will end with them, like Huck Finn, riding a river raft back home? THE BOOK OF POLLY has a kick like the best hot sauce, and a great blend of humor and sadness, pathos and hilarity. This is a bittersweet novel about the grip of love in a truly quirky family and you'll come to know one of the most unforgettable mother-daughter duos you've ever met.

The third novel in the New York Times bestselling Thursday Next series is “great fun—especially for those with a literary turn of mind and a taste for offbeat comedy” (The Washington Post Book World). “Delightful . . . the well of Fforde’s imagination is bottomless.”—People “Fforde creates a literary reality that is somewhere amid a triangulation of Douglas Adams, Monty Python, and Miss Marple.”—The Denver Post With the 923rd Annual Bookworld Awards just around the corner and an unknown villain wreaking havoc in Jurisfiction, what could possibly be next for Detective Thursday Next? Protecting the world’s greatest literature—not to mention keeping up with Miss Havisham—is tiring work for an expectant mother. And Thursday can definitely use a respite. So what better hideaway than inside the unread and unreadable Caversham Heights, a cliché-ridden pulp mystery in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside? But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well itself is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books—like Caversham Heights—are scrapped for salvage. To top it off, a murderer is stalking Jurisfiction personnel and nobody is safe—least of all Thursday. Don’t miss any of Jasper Fforde’s delightfully entertaining Thursday Next novels: THE EYRE AFFAIR • LOST IN A GOOD BOOK • THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS • SOMETHING ROTTEN • FIRST AMONG SEQUELS • ONE OF OUR THURSDAYS IS MISSING • THE WOMAN WHO DIED A LOT

Examines the significance of animal environments in contemporary continental thought.

T he material in this volume is culled from over two thousand stories about Maharajji gathered during five years from more than one hundred devotees. To these devotees who shared their treasured memo ries, I wish to express my deep love and appreciation. Some of them felt that no book could or should be written about a being with qualities as vast, formless, and subtle as Maharajji’s, and yet they contributed their stories nevertheless. I honor them for this kindness and I hope that in my zeal to share experiences of Maharajji with others who were not fortu nate enough to have met him, I have not misused their trust. Some devotees tell me that stories told by other devotees are not fac tually accurate. I have no way of ascertaining the authenticity of any single story. All I can report is that those o f us who gathered the stories were impressed by the credibility of those of us who told the stories. Though the responsibility for this manuscript lies solely with me, I am delighted to acknowledge a lot o f loving help from my friends:

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981), a revered master of the Tantric Nath Lineage, is an inspiring example of an ordinary family man who attained complete realization of the Infinte. Living the absolute nonduality of Being in every moment, he taught that true freedom is a possiblity open to everyone of us. These discourses are about Transcendence. The massage is clear: Return to what you were before before your so-called birth. Be in that eternity, a state of wholeness. It is changeless reality from which all change has sprung. Maharaj`s wisdom is truely partaking of the Gods, because it restores us to our original pristine and blissful condition, the rediscovery of our Source.