The Mourning Wave A Novel Of The Great Storm

Elite athlete Rainey Abbott is an intense competitor on the outside, but inside, she feels a daunting apprehension about her chances of finding true love. Her life as a downhill skier and race car driver keeps her on the edge, but her love life is stuck in neutral. A tragedy from her past has left her feeling insecure and unlovable. Now that she's in her thirties, Rainey's best friend Natalie insists she take a leap and try online dating. Rainey connects with brian85 and becomes cautiously hopeful as a natural attraction grows between them. Fearful a face to face meeting could ruin the magic, Rainey enlists Natalie to scheme up an encounter between the two where Brian is unaware he is meeting his online mystery woman. Rainey is left feeling both guilty about the deception and disappointed by something Brian says. When they finally meet in earnest, Rainey's insecurities threaten to derail the blossoming romance. As she struggles with self-acceptance, she reveals the risks we all must take to have a chance for love.

Fiction from a National Book Award-winning author and “short-story writer of substantial gifts and reputation” (The New York Times). From National Book Award Winner Ellen Gilchrist, a pillar of Southern literature hailed by the Washington Post as “a national treasure,” comes a colorful collection of short stories integrating favorite characters with captivating newcomers. Rhoda’s reveling in her childhood and infinite possibility in “The Tree Fort” and “The Time Capsule” is juxtaposed with her darker adulthood in “Mexico.” Nora Jane returns alongside Lin Tan Sing, a Chinese medical student and geneticist who predicts the birth of her twins. Fans of Gilchrist won’t want to miss the author’s exploration of the many stages of life—and the lightness and darkness each can bring. “Several stories in Gilchrist’s latest collection are distinguished by her old magic—they have energy and gusto and humor, and a dark layer of knowledge beneath their nostalgic tone.”—Publishers Weekly “A validation of the author’s skill and versatility. Gilchrist creates new experiences for characters from earlier stories and … creates new characters who reveal her skill in portraying character and place.”—Library Journal

A brave, intimate, beautifully crafted memoir by a survivor of the tsunami that struck the Sri Lankan coast in 2004 and took her entire family. On December 26, Boxing Day, Sonali Deraniyagala, her English husband, her parents, her two young sons, and a close friend were ending Christmas vacation at the seaside resort of Yala on the south coast of Sri Lanka when a wave suddenly overtook them. She was only to learn later that this was a tsunami that devastated coastlines through Southeast Asia. When the water began to encroach closer to their hotel, they began to run, but in an instant, water engulfed them, Sonali was separated from her family, and all was lost. Sonali Deraniyagala has written an extraordinarily honest, utterly engrossing account of the surreal tragedy of a devastating event that all at once ended her life as she knew it and her journey since in search of understanding and redemption. It is also a remarkable portrait of a young family's life and what came before, with all the small moments and larger dreams that suddenly and irrevocably ended.

Queen of the Waves is a historical fiction novel that ties together the tales of two dramatic events that shaped the upper Texas Gulf Coast: Galveston's Great Storm of 1900 and the "secret" hurricane that struck Galveston during WWII in 1943. Through the characters of Marie Covington and Woodrow Harris, the parallels drawn against the backdrop of two historical storms tell of a remarkable people. Where Marie faces the risk of losing everything in 1943, Woodrow is a man who has lost all a man can lose in 1900, but uses his painful story of survival to teach what it truly means to be resilient amid the storms of life.

The women in an Arctic village must survive a sinister threat after all the men are wiped out by a catastrophic storm in this "gripping novel inspired by a real-life witch hunt. . . . Beautiful and chilling" (Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe). When the women take over, is it sorcery or power? Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the skies break into a sudden and reckless storm. All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster. For the women left behind, survival means defying the strict rules of the island. They fish, hunt, and butcher reindeer—which they never did while the men were alive. But the foundation of this new feminine frontier begins to crack with the arrival of Absalom Cornet, a man sent from Scotland to root out alleged witchcraft. Cornet brings with him the threat of danger—and a pretty, young Norwegian wife named Ursa. As Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them, with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence. "The Mercies has a pull as sure as the tide. It totally swept me away to Vardø, where grief struck islanders stand tall in the shadow of religious persecution and witch burnings. It's a beautifully intimate story of friendship, love and hope. A haunting ode to self-reliant and quietly defiant women." (Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize winning author of Shuggie Bain)

Mrs. Louise Mallard, afflicted with a heart condition, reflects on the death of her husband from the safety of her locked room. Originally published in Vogue magazine, “The Story of an Hour” was retitled as “The Dream of an Hour,” when it was published amid much controversy under its new title a year later in St. Louis Life. “The Story of an Hour” was adapted to film in The Joy That Kills by director Tina Rathbone, which was part of a PBS anthology called American Playhouse. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

A debut novel, set in a small fishing town on the Massachusetts coast, chronicles the lives of three very different women--Eve, a beautiful artist; her wealthy, eccentric grandmother, Elizabeth; and Maggie, an exotic stranger involved with a ruthless rum smuggler--from 1913 to the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. A first novel. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.