Peaches for Father Francis - A Novel

Rule # 1: Dessert eases stress…

When dessert no longer interests her and cleaning closets wins over answering her phone, Katy Kruger knows she’s in trouble. A recent widow, she’s stalled in her grieving despite solid support from her dessert-loving, lifelong friends and loyal family.

Rule #2: Dessert enhances happy times…

But a trip to Alaska to babysit for her grandson prompts a change. So does the puppy she adopts on that trip, and an interesting man who likes to share a dessert and a cup of coffee.
Might life be giving her another path to happiness?

Rule # 3: Sometimes life demands more than dessert…

When she returns to her hometown, life continues to throw challenges her way--her mother dies and her father can’t live alone. But Katy meets them with renewed vitality. Solid support from her friends, family and a few desserts help.
But how does she handle her heart wanting and needing to be in two places…

Better Than Dessert is Book One in The Dessert Dames series. Its basis is female friendship, families, marriage and how these important elements shape the women who are part of the Dessert Dames group. Careers also can be part of a friend's story, but only in how a career shapes the friendships, serves the friendships and relates to the families of the women. Each book will have a central story dealing with one friend who's facing a major crisis. However, this series will have continuing characters.

Here is a tapestry of stories about the complex and unique relationship that exists between brothers. In this book, some of our finest authors take an unvarnished look at how brothers admire and admonish, revere and revile, connect and compete, love and war with each other. With hearts and minds wide open, and, in some cases, with laugh-out-loud humor, the writers tackle a topic that is as old as the Bible and yet has been, heretofore, overlooked.

Contributors range in age from twenty-four to eighty-four, and their stories from comic to tragic. Brothers examines and explores the experiences of love and loyalty and loss, of altruism and anger, of competition and compassion—the confluence of things that conspire to form the unique nature of what it is to be and to have a brother.

“Brother.” One of our eternal and quintessential terms of endearment. Tobias Wolff writes, “The good luck of having a brother is partly the luck of having stories to tell.” David Kaczynski, brother of “The Unabomber”: “I’ll start with the premise that a brother shows you who you are—and also who you are not. He’s an image of the self, at one remove . . . You are a ‘we’ with your brother before you are a ‘we’ with any other.” Mikal Gilmore refers to brotherhood as a “fidelity born of blood.”

We’ve heard that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But where do the apples fall in relation to each other? And are we, in fact, our brothers’ keepers, after all?

It begins as Miranda and David Claybourne move into a country house with a once-beautiful garden. But reality turns out to be very different from their dream. Soon the latent unhappiness in the family begins to come to the surface, isolating each family member in a bubble of resentment and loneliness.

Then an enigmatic Frenchman arrives on their doorstep. With the wisdom of nature, he slowly begins to heal the past and the present. But who is he? When Miranda reads about his past in a diary she finds in the cottage by the garden, the whole family learns that a garden, like love itself, can restore the human spirit, not just season after season but generation after generation.

Wise and winsome, poignant and powerfully moving, The French Gardener is a contemporary story told with an old-fashioned sensibility steeped in the importance of family and the magical power of love.

Conceived in love and possibility, Bonaventure Arrow didn't make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead. No one knows that Bonaventure's silence is filled with resonance—a miraculous gift of rarified hearing that encompasses the Universe of Every Single Sound. Growing up in the big house on Christopher Street in Bayou Cymbaline, Bonaventure can hear flowers grow, a thousand shades of blue, and the miniature tempests that rage inside raindrops. He can also hear the gentle voice of his father, William Arrow, shot dead before Bonaventure was born by a mysterious stranger known only as the Wanderer.

Bonaventure's remarkable gift of listening promises salvation to the souls who love him: his beautiful young mother, Dancy, haunted by the death of her husband; his Grand-mère Letice, plagued by grief and a long-buried guilt she locks away in a chapel; and his father, William, whose roaming spirit must fix the wreckage of the past. With the help of Trinidad Prefontaine, a Creole housekeeper endowed with her own special gifts, Bonaventure will find the key to long-buried mysteries and soothe a chorus of family secrets clamoring to be healed.

The beloved author of Wicked reimagines Hans Christian Andersen's classic story "The Little Match Girl" for modern readers in this charming, beautifully illustrated gift book

Each year, National Public Radio asks a writer to compose a story with a Christmas theme. In 2008, Gregory Maguire offered a new twist on a classic tale, reinventing the Hans Christian Andersen classic "The Little Match Girl."

When the story was first translated from Danish and published in England in the mid-nineteenth century, the match girl's dying visions of lights and a grandmother in heaven were often interpreted as metaphors of religious salvation. In Matchless, Maguire adds a different dimension to the story, intertwining the match girl's tale with that of a young boy, Frederik, whose own yearnings are the catalyst for a better future for himself and his family. Maguire uses his storytelling magic to rekindle Andersen's original intentions and to suggest transcendence, the permanence of spirit, and the continuity that links the living and the dead.