I just don’t want to share my toys. I know I should, but I just don’t want to. Kids have sticky gooie hands and they always break stuff.
My Father’s House: In Search of a Lost Past
Matthew Carr
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
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In 1995 Matthew Carr returned to Guyana in the Caribbean, where his parents’ marriage had broken up nearly thirty years before, in order to investigate the mysterious death of his father Bill Carr in 1991. A popular and charismatic English lecturer, a lover of DH Lawrence, Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold, and a left-wing political activist with a strong public presence in West Indian politics, Bill Carr was also a violent alcoholic who beat his wife and children, and whose alcohol-induced mayhem forced his family to return to England without him in 1967.
In the ensuing decades little was known of the life he led in a country whose single claim to international fame in all that period was the ‘Jonestown massacre.’ Apart from a single visit to England a few years before his death, Bill Carr had, it seemed, cut himself off from his family and his country and chosen to live a life of exile with a new family in his adopted country. His son’s decision to return to Guyana for the first time since 1967 was partly prompted by the confused circumstances that preceded his father’s death, in which he seemed to express a wish to return to his native land.
What began as an exploration of a lost West Indies childhood in Jamaica and Guyana and an investigation of his father’s chaotic and contradictory personality, became a compelling and extraordinary journey into the racial politics and history of the Caribbean, and Guyana in particular. Why did so many people remember Bill Carr so well when his family remembered him so badly? Why had his father cut himself off from his family so completely and so brutally? Why had he wanted to return? What caused his death?
Alternating between meetings with his father’s friends, colleagues, enemies and family members, Carr sets out to answer these questions and reconcile their memories with those of his family. In doing so he draws an often shocking and disturbing portrait of a tormented and contradictory figure whose undoubted capacity for good was often matched by a formidable self-destructive streak that eventually killed him and damaged many of those closest to him.
The result is a striking combination of family history, travelogue, and colonial history that recalls Malcolm Lowry, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, in which the story of Bill Carr’s steep descent into masochistic self-destruction mirrors the collapse of Guyana under the post-colonial dictatorship of Forbes Burnham.
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Knightfall: Book 1 of The Chronicle of Benjamin Knight
Robert Jackson-Lawrence
Genre: Action & Adventure | Teen & Young Adult
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‘Lord of the Rings for the Call of Duty Generation’
At the age of fifteen, genius Benjamin Knight had developed a technology that would change the world. But when the project is sabotaged, Ben wakes to find himself in a mysterious and unfamiliar land where an uneasy peace hangs in the balance.
Saved from near death by a band of traders, he joins them on their journey north as he struggles to understand the world he’s in and how it happened. However, Ben soon realizes that everyone has their secrets and that no one is safe, especially when one man has the power to realize his ambitions.
Ben wants answers, but with war looming, he may not survive long enough to find them in this series that breaks the barrier between science fiction and fantasy!
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I Do-Over: Confessions of a Recalcitrant Bridesmaid
Michele Riccio
Genre: Contemporary Fiction | Humor & Satire | Women’s Fiction
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Grace Douglas has a secret crush on Jon, the boy next door. The problem is: at thirty-six she’s well past the age of secret crushes, her father insists Jon is her brother (by dint of his marriage to Jon’s mother), and Jon is nothing more than brotherly when he spends the night in her hotel room.
Then a meddling fortuneteller convinces Grace’s half-sister, Kitty she needs to re-stage her recent wedding – and get it right this time – or suffer the consequences. Dodging the bullets of a mysterious, if incompetent, stalker and fending off Heraldo, co-worker without a work ethic are a piece of wedding cake for Grace – compared to being Kitty’s maid of honor.
Grace has to find a way out. Or be seen by the man she loves – wearing a bridesmaid gown.
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Eddy’s Current
Reed Sprague
Genre: Political | Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
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Hell’s angels reach up and plant their special seed just below the surface in America’s heartland. Political and media extremists don’t notice the young shoot as it begins to grow. They’re busy with their perpetual banquet, serving comfort food to each other and to select members of the clergy. The menu includes every imaginable combination of hog trough fare for the elite.
The quality of the food doesn’t matter—it’s somewhere between near–rotten leftovers and cheap junk food. The huge servings fatten the chosen just fine. The resulting muck fertilizes the U.S. heartland, providing the nutrients necessary to grow the soul of Satan’s exceptional infant.
The special baby boy, christened Tyler Lee Peterson, reaches age twenty then descends steadily for another twenty–three years deep into a personal and professional living nightmare. His world is dark and he is desperate. He is out of options so he gambles.
Peterson bets that the far right in America will grant him salvation without works and then cast him to stardom. His gamble pays off. The country’s power pendulum swings down from the far left to its lowest possible point, grabs Peterson, pulls him out of the mire, continues toward the extreme right, and hurtles him to the pinnacle of world power.
Crafted by politicians, promoted by media and embraced by clergy, the new American norm — two political extremes without an average — settles in and is perfectly comfortable. The disturbed aren’t bothered by the disturbance. Peterson fits in.
Into this madness of extremes that produces Tyler Peterson, Eddy’s Current thrusts a small and diverse group of Americans, each of whom seems to have been set aside from the extremism that plagues their country. This band battles against all odds to restore their fellow citizens’ freedoms and their country’s independence. You will be inspired by their fight.
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The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35
Asha Veal Brisebois
Genre: Travel | Education & Teaching
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Today, young people are traveling to countries such as South Sudan to work in water treatment, and Vietnam to shoot documentaries about healing after war. They are joining in to perform air guitar at festivals in Finland, and listening intently from within the audience at community film screenings in Rwanda.
The challenge of today is not just “where do I fit in one small place,” but identity and interaction throughout the world.
The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35 offers a peer-written collection of 48 vivid and transportive, personal and original nonfiction pieces that portray contemporary snapshots across the globe.
Contributors include:
- Theopi Skarlatos, journalist with the BBC
- Daniel Ketchum, editor at Marvel Comics
- Derek Helwig, twelve-season producer with The Amazing Race
- Vanessa Mdee, VJ at MTV Base and HIV/AIDS activist
- Kaitlin Solimine, co-founder of HIPPO Reads
- Andrew Bisharat, editor-at-large for Rock and Ice magazine
- Lisa Dazols, co-filmmaker and blogger of Out & Around
- Yuki Aizawa, 2007-2008 facilitator at StoryCorps
- Justin “Nordic Thunder” Howard, 2012 Air Guitar World Champion
and many more writers and adventurers, whose publication histories include: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vogue India, San Francisco Chronicle, Condé Nast Traveler, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Lonely Planet, Velvet Park, Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Abu Dhabi Film Festival Magazine, and others and whose backgrounds include awards from the: National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, U.S. Department of State Fulbright Creative Arts Fellows, Hedgebrook Writing Residency, Illinois Arts Council, and more within the book’s wide roster, you’ll hear from such a range of storytellers, the likes of: a sailor and glaciologist from Scotland, Brooklyn musician, Tanzanian television host, Dubai-based journalist, and a Montreal aerospace medicine enthusiast, plus rural school teachers, a fearless rock climber, five-country midwife, and so many more.
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