Alice Bliss

Alice Bliss is fifteen. She's smart, funny, and clever. Not afraid to stand up for the things she believes in. She also idolises her father and, when he leaves home to fight a war she doesn't believe in, Alice is distraught. She and her mother negotiate his absence as best they can - waiting impatiently for his letters, throwing themselves into school and work respectively, bickering intermittently and, in Alice's case, falling for the boy next door - but then they're told that he's missing in action and have to face up to the fact that he may never return. Telling a story of love and loss, of grief and growing up, of family and friendship, Alice Bliss is a powerful, poignant portrayal of a young girl facing up to the unthinkable. Both intimate and universal, it is, ultimately, a story of a daughter's love for her father.

"Outside the back window Alice can see the outlines of the garden, some of the furrows visible under the snow, stretching away in long thin rows. She can't imagine doing the garden without her dad. It's his thing; she's always thought of herself as his assistant at best. She can't imagine doing anything without her dad and she starts to feel like she can't breathe. And then she looks at him. Just looks at him as he watches the fire with muffin crumbs on his lap. 'I'll write to you.' 'I know, sweetheart.' 'Every day.'" --From Alice Bliss When Alice Bliss learns that her father, Matt, is being deployed to Iraq, she's heartbroken. Alice idolizes her father, loves working beside him in their garden, accompanying him on the occasional roofing job, playing baseball. When he ships out, Alice is faced with finding a way to fill the emptiness he has left behind. Matt will miss seeing his daughter blossom from a tomboy into a full-blown teenager. Alice will learn to drive, join the track team, go to her first dance, and fall in love, all while trying to be strong for her mother, Angie, and take care of her precocious little sister, Ellie. But the smell of Matt is starting to fade from his blue shirt that Alice wears everyday, and the phone calls are never long enough. Alice Bliss is a profoundly moving coming-of-age novel about love and its many variations--the support of a small town looking after its own; love between an absent father and his daughter; the complicated love between an adolescent girl and her mother; and an exploration of new love with the boy-next-door. These characters' struggles amidst uncertain times echo our own, lending the novel an immediacy and poignancy that is both relevant and real. At once universal and very personal, Alice Bliss is a transforming story about those who are left at home during wartime, and a teenage girl bravely facing the future.

These thought-provoking and spiritual poems focus on faith, relationships, and the role of God in life and in the bedroom. Female empowerment is at the heart of this collection, as well as perceptions of humanity as beings full of light.

Tapping into the political power of magic and astrology for social, community, and personal transformation. In a cross-cultural approach to understanding astrology as a magical language, Alice Sparkly Kat unmasks the political power of astrology, showing how it can be channeled as a force for collective healing and liberation. Too often, magic and astrology are divorced from their potency and cultural contexts: co-opted by neoliberalism, used as a force of oppression, or distilled beyond recognition into applications that belie their individual and collective power. By looking at the symbolic and etymological histories of the sun, moon, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, we can trace and understand the politics of magic--and challenge our own practices, interrogate our truths, and reshape our institutions to build better frameworks for communities of care. Fearless, radical, and fresh, Sparkly Kat's Postcolonial Astrology ushers in a new wave of astrology revival, refusing to apologize for its magickism and connecting its power to the spirituality and politics we need now. Intersectional, inclusive, and geared towards queer and POC communities, it uses our historical and collective constructs of the planets, sun, and moon to re-chart our subconscious history, redefine the body in the world, and assert our politics of the personal, in astrology and all things.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF Sometimes I Lie “Stunning. Addictive. This book should not be missed!” —Samantha Downing “Deliciously dark...will have readers tearing through the pages.” —Mary Kubica “Gives Gone Girl a run for its money...I couldn’t stop reading.” —Christina Dalcher There are two sides to every story: yours and mine, ours and theirs, His & Hers. Which means someone is always lying. When a woman is murdered in Blackdown, a quintessentially British village, newsreader Anna Andrews is reluctant to cover the case. Detective Jack Harper is suspicious of her involvement, until he becomes a suspect in his own murder investigation. Someone isn’t telling the truth, and some secrets are worth killing to keep. His & Hers is a twisty, smart, psychological thriller. A gripping tale of suspense, told by expertly-drawn narrators that will keep readers guessing until the very end. “For the ultimate rollercoaster reading experience this year, look no further than His & Hers by Alice Feeney.” —Woman & Home

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection With hardly any notice, foolish and plain housekeeper Johanna flees her employer and sets off to find the man she’s fallen in love with. Little does she know that her correspondence with him has been a complete fabrication, a cruel teenager’s idea of a practical joke. So, who will Johanna find when she steps off her train with the household furniture in tow? Alice Munro is the universally celebrated master of the contemporary short story, the Chekhov of our time. Nowhere are her powers better on display than in this exquisitely crafted story exploring the wonderful and unexpected places where love, or the illusion of it, can lead. This selection is the title story of Munro’s acclaimed collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and the basis of the 2013 film, Hateship Loveship. An ebook short.

A successful solicitor, her business partner’s daughter, and their unexpected chance at love. Alice McAllister is successful, quiet and disciplined. When her law partner Miranda forces her to take a vacation at her holiday home in Portugal, the unexpected presence of Miranda’s daughter Joy turns Alice’s world up-side down. Despite their differences–the age gap between them only being one of many–Alice and Joy embark on a passionate holiday romance... until they have to return home. Can their steamy summer fling turn into a love that lasts? Or will the real world impose too many obstacles to Alice and Joy’s young and fragile love? Find out in this sultry lesbian age-gap novel by chart-topping lesbian romance author Harper Bliss! *★★★★★ “*Harper Bliss is the queen of age gap romances. Be sure to pick this one up right away.” – The Lesbian Review

The Dickerson sisters and their family homesteaded what was reportedly the last half-homestead in Colorado. At an altitude of over 8000 feet in the Rocky Mountains they persevered all their lives under extreme hardship. This is a true story of the famly's lifelong struggle enduring elements of cold winter weather coupled with determination, ingenuity, hard work, working together as a family and is a remarkable example of thriftiness. The family lived for more than 89 years in a crude, but adequate, log cabin without electricity and other conveniences most modern Americans could not and would not live without. These surviving sisters lived comfortably in the cozy little cabin equipped with woodstove and, in later years, gaslights. The sisters, Alice and Helen Dickerson, along with their families did whatever they could to earn a living, including trapping, logging, raising cattle, sewing and making pine needle baskets and other artwork, which they sold through the years to literally thousands of people who drove up a narrow winding mountain road specifically to buy their quaint products. If visitors were lucky, they arrived in time to be served home-baked bread or cookies by their gracious hostesses. Though lacking in much formal education and very isolated, the ladies were well-read, very intelligent and kept up with what was going on in the world. They were admired and loved by all who met them and are well worth reading about. The Dickerson sisters were tabbed "Living Legends" by Dan MacArthur of the Fort Collins Triangle Review, " The Undaunted Dickersons" by renowned Denver Post writer Red Fenwick, "The University of the Upper Buckhorn" by Marietta Neumeister, "Our Ladies of the Mountains" by Elyse Bliss in a local Poudre Canyon publication and were written about by numerous others before Elyse Bliss wrote Apples of the Mummy's Eye, a title which refers to the mountain range to the west of the Dickerson homestead.

Garden of Bliss begins on the French Riviera, where Moffitt, despite her glamorous European lifestyle, feels empty. Realizing that financial success doesn't necessarily equate to happiness, she looks inside herself and decides to make some changes. The message of her journey is simple: bliss is a destination that exists within all of us. Using the metaphor of a secret garden, Moffitt encourages her readers to manifest this space in the physical world and connect with the divine feminine through nature.

“A luminous, Marquez-esque tale” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from the New York Times bestselling author of The Museum of Extraordinary Things: a forbidden love story set on a tropical island about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro—the Father of Impressionism. Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel’s mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for being a difficult girl who refuses to live by the rules. Growing up, Rachel’s salvation is their maid Adelle’s belief in her strengths, and her deep, life-long friendship with Jestine, Adelle’s daughter. But Rachel’s life is not her own. She is married off to a widower with three children to save her father’s business. When her older husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Frédérick, arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects all of her family, including her favorite son, who will become one of the greatest artists of France. “A work of art” (Dallas Morning News), The Marriage of Opposites showcases the beloved, bestselling Alice Hoffman at the height of her considerable powers. “Her lush, seductive prose, and heart-pounding subject…make this latest skinny-dip in enchanted realism…the Platonic ideal of the beach read” (Slate.com). Once forgotten to history, the marriage of Rachel and Frédérick “will only renew your commitment to Hoffman’s astonishing storytelling” (USA TODAY).