I believed i was the author of my life, that I controlled the narration. From their first kiss, twenty-seven-year-old writer Danielle Trussoni is spellbound by a novelist from Bulgaria. But i wasn’t another woman. Rising action, dramatic complication, heroes and villains and dark plots. The two share a love of jazz and books and travel, passions that intensify their whirlwind romance.

As a writer, story was all that mattered. Ultimately, she finds the strength to overcome her illusions, and start again. An incisive look at romantic love, the Fortress is one woman’s fight to understand the complexities of her own heart, told by one of the best writers of her generation. I was a woman ready for her story to begin.

The critically acclaimed, bestselling author of Falling Through the Earth and Angelology returns with this much-anticipated memoir of love and transformation in France. Eight years later, hopeful to renew their marriage, Danielle and her husband move to the south of France, to a picturesque medieval village in the Languedoc.

. I was a woman ready to be swept away. It is here, in a haunted stone fortress built by the Knights Templar, that she comes to understand the dark, subterranean forces that have been following her all along. While danielle and her husband eventually part, Danielle's time in the fortress brings precious wisdom about life and love that she could not have learned otherwise.

A Pig in Provence: Good Food and Simple Pleasures in the South of France

From the publisher of under the tuscan Sun comes another extraordinary memoir of a woman embarking on a new life—this time in the South of France. She and her husband, bought a small farmhouse with a little land, with their young daughter in tow, and a few goats and pigs and so began a life-affirming journey.

Filled with delicious recipes and local color, this evocative and passionate memoir describes her life cooking and living in the Provenal tradition. Thirty years ago, james beard award-winning author Georgeanne Brennan set out to realize the dream of a peaceful, rural existence en Provence.

Lisette's List: A Novel

When war breaks out, andré goes off to the front, but not before hiding Pascal’s paintings to keep them from the Nazis’ reach. From susan vreeland, luncheon of the Boating Party, bestselling author of such acclaimed novels as Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and Clara and Mr. But as she soon discovers, the hilltop town is rich with unexpected pleasures.

. Lisette regrets having to give up her dream of becoming a gallery apprentice and longs for the comforts and sophistication of Paris. In 1937, young lisette roux and her husband, André, move from Paris to a village in Provence to care for André’s grandfather Pascal. Pascal once worked in the nearby ochre mines and later became a pigment salesman and frame maker; while selling his pigments in Paris, he befriended Pissarro and Cézanne, some of whose paintings he received in trade for his frames.

Pascal begins to tutor lisette in both art and life, allowing her to see his small collection of paintings and the Provençal landscape itself in a new light. With german forces spreading across europe, the sudden fall of Paris, and the rise of Vichy France, Lisette sets out to locate the paintings #11.

Her search takes her through the stunning french countryside, where she befriends Marc and Bella Chagall, her neighbors, who are in hiding before their flight to America, and acquaints her with the land, and even herself in ways she never dreamed possible. Great strength is its lovingly detailed setting.

The Astor Orphan: A Memoir

Aldrich reaches back to the gilded Age when the Astor legacy began to come undone, leaving the Aldrich branch of the family penniless and squabbling over what was left. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs that bring this faded world into focus, The Astor Orphan is written with the grit of The Glass Castle and set amid the aristocratic decay of Grey Gardens.

. The astor orphan is an unflinching debut memoir by a direct descendant of John Jacob Astor, Alexandra Aldrich. She brilliantly tells the story of her eccentric, fractured family; her 1980s childhood of bohemian neglect in the squalid attic of Rokeby, the family’s Hudson Valley Mansion; and her brave escape from the clan.

.

Angle of Repose Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics

Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enchantment of life. Los angeles times this Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Jackson J. A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.

The atlantic Monthly"Brilliant. Stegner’s pulitzer prize-winning novel of personal, historical, and geographic discovery Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier.

But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. Benson. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1, 500 titles, penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.

Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

Cause for celebration.

The Paris Key

An american in paris navigates her family’s secret past and unlocks her own future, in this emotionally evocative novel by New York Times bestselling author Juliet Blackwell. As a girl, genevieve martin spent the happiest summer of her life in Paris, learning the delicate art of locksmithing at her uncle’s side.

But since then, she has become more private, living back in the States, more subdued. She has been an observer of life rather than an active participant, holding herself back from those around her, including her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Paris never really left genevieve, as her marriage crumbles, and, she finds herself faced with an incredible opportunity: return to the magical city of her youth to take over her late uncle’s shop.

But as she absorbs all that parisian culture has to offer, she realizes the city also holds secrets about her family that could change her forever, and that locked doors can protect you or imprison you, depending on which side of them you stand.

A Walk on the Beach: Tales of Wisdom From an Unconventional Woman

From the author of the bestselling a year by the Sea, comes the inspiring story about how her and Joan Erikson's friendship pushed them to remember the importance of transformation and sustained them through their unique challenges. Shortly after arriving on cape cod to spend a year by herself, Joan Anderson’s chance encounter with a wise and astonishing woman helped her usher in the self-discoveries that led to her ongoing renewal.

A walk on the beach is an experience to savor and treasure, a glimpse of the exuberant spirit that can be sustained and passed on in all our friendships. In writing about their extraordinary friendship, Anderson reveals a need she didn’t know she had: for a mentor to help navigate the transitions she faced as she grew beyond middle age.

But her wisdom was best taught through their friendship; as she sat with Anderson, weaving tapestries of their lives with brightly colored yarn while exploring the strength gathered from their accumulated experiences, Joan Erikson’s lessons took shape on their small cardboard looms as well as in her friend’s revitalized life.

And when joan erikson had to face her husband’s death and the growing limitations of her own body, Anderson was able to give back some of the wisdom she had gleaned. After erik’s death, she wrote several books extending their theory of the stages of life to reflect her understanding of aging as she neared ninety-five.

Joan erikson was perhaps best known for her collaboration with her husband, Erik, a pioneering psychoanalyst and noted author. To this poignant, joyful account, Joan Anderson brings the candor and sensitivity that have made her an acclaimed speaker and writer on midlife and its possibilities.

More Ketchup than Salsa: Confessions of a Tenerife Barman

A laugh-out-loud, heartwarming memoir. Winner of ‘best travel Narrative’ by the British Guild of Travel Writers. If you only buy one book this year. Get this. Probably the best book I have read this millenium. Fantastic, hilarious, painful. Completely un-put-downable!"Childhood sweethearts, Joe and Joy are broke and bored.

They’re also tired of smelling of fish. When offered the chance to escape from the dreary market stalls of England to run a bar on a sub-tropical island, they recklessly jump at the opportunity - despite their spectacular lack of experience. In tenerife, dreams of a better life overseas are soon crushed by mini-mafias, East European prostitutes and biblical-grade cockroach infestations.

Joe and joy's foreign fantasy turns into a nightmare as they find themselves trapped with a failing bar in a foreign land, pandering to a bar full of oddball expats while trying to stop their relationship crashing into the rocks. Can they save their business, their dreams, and their relationship before it's too late.

. If you've ever wondered if the grass really is greener on the other side, you need to read this hilarious and heartwarming memoir now!""A book full of humor, laughter and tears. Loved the story, the humour, the characters - found it hard to put down.

In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities

With dry wit and genuine affection, one defined by the artists, dreamers, celebrities, painters, he shares a story of the Hamptons that few know, farmers, fishermen, hangers-on, and billionaires who live and play there. Long before the hamptons became famous for its posh parties, and glitterati, paparazzi, it was a sleepy backwater of fishing villages and potato farms, literary luminaries and local eccentrics.

A colorful insider’s account of life, in the hamptons is an intimate portrait of a place and the people who formed and transformed it, and literary figures like John Steinbeck and Truman Capote, love, and celebrity, scandal, colorful locals like bar owner Bobby Van and shark fisherman Frank Mundus who the character Quinn from Jaws was based on, from former residents like Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, to present-day stars like Bianca Jagger and Billy Joel.

. An insider who lived there—as well as a jewish outsider amid the WASP contingent—Rattiner both revels in and is rattled by all he witnesses and records in one of the world’s most famous places. As the editor and publisher of the area’s popular free newspaper, has been covering the daily triumphs, Dan Rattiner, Dan’s Papers, community intrigues, and larger-than-life personalities for nearly fifty years.

.

A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

A young woman moves across an ocean to uncover the truth about her grandparents' mysterious estrangement and pieces together the extraordinary story of their wartime experiences In 1948, after surviving World War II by escaping Nazi-occupied France for refugee camps in Switzerland, Anna and Armand, Miranda's grandparents, bought an old stone house in a remote, picturesque village in the South of France.

She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive--making a home in the village and falling in love. With warmth, humor, and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations.

To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house, now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters, archival materials, and declining, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, grandparents.

. Aside from one brief encounter, never remarried, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, and never revealed what had divided them forever. A fifty-year silence is the deeply involving account of miranda Richmond Mouillot's journey to find out what happened between her grandmother, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, and her grandfather, a physician, who refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him.

Five years later, anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking the typewriter and their children. As she reconstructs how anna and armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship, the burden of history, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, and the complexities of memory.

Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

Exhausted after each thirty-mile day, Aspen was forced to confront her numbness, at times on the verge of starvation, coming to terms with the sexual assault and her parents' disappointing reaction. Overprotected by her parents who discouraged her from telling of the attack, Aspen was confused and ashamed.

She found her strength. A nineteen-year-old girl alone and lost, she conquered desolate mountain passes and met rattlesnakes, bears, and fellow desert pilgrims. Girl in the woods is aspen matis's exhilarating true-life adventure of hiking from Mexico to Canada—a coming of age story, a survival story, and a triumphant story of overcoming emotional devastation.

. On her second night of college, Aspen was raped by a fellow student. After a thousand miles of solitude, she found a man who helped her learn to love and trust again—and heal. Told with elegance and suspense, girl in the Woods is a beautifully rendered story of eroding emotional and physical boundaries to reveal the truths that lie beyond the edges of the map.

Dealing with a problem that has sadly become all too common on college campuses around the country, she stumbled through her first semester—a challenging time made even harder by the coldness of her college's "conflict mediation" process. On the trail and on her own, she found that survival is predicated on persistent self-reliance.

Her desperation growing, she made a bold decision: She would seek healing in the freedom of the wild, on the 2, 650-mile Pacific Crest Trail leading from Mexico to Canada. In this inspiring memoir, dangerous, Aspen chronicles her journey, a five-month trek that was ambitious, and transformative.