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Born White in the heart of Zululand during the racial apartheid, Lisa-Jo Baker longed to write a new future for her children—a longing that set her on a journey to understand where she fit into a story of violence and faith, history and race. Before marriage and motherhood, she came to the United States to study to become a human rights advocate. When she naïvely walked right into America’s own turbulent racial landscape, Baker experienced the kind of painful awakening that is both individual and universal, personal and social.

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

In the middle of an awful divorce, 53-year-old Georgia Carpenter finds herself out of luck, time, and money. Then her phone rings with the news that her great aunt has died and left her a cottage in the Gulf Coast town of Blackbird Beach. Georgia has no idea what awaits her on the other coast of Florida. All she knows is that she has nowhere else to go. And no reason to stay where she is.

There’s a wedding on the horizon, and Georgia Carpenter couldn’t be happier. But that doesn’t mean she’s lost sight of everything that still needs to be done to get the Sea Glass Inn ready for opening. Not only is she preparing for that, but the magazine photoshoot is right around the corner, too. As is the town council election. Most people think Travis Taylor, the inn’s handsome handyman, is a shoo-in, but with Lavinia Major as his opponent, anything could happen. And probably will.

The Christmas party at the Sea Glass Inn is a long-held tradition, one the townspeople of Blackbird Beach consider the kick-off of the Christmas season. Until, of course, the inn closed, and the party stopped happening. Now Georgia Carpenter has decided it’s time to restart that tradition, even though the party is a massive undertaking and one that will influence how people feel about the inn for the rest of the year. With the help of her sister, Lilly, Georgia hopes to put on an event that will be merry and bright and spark new interest in the business.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.

Gripped by a tyrant king and in the thrall of dark magic, the kingdom is in peril. Elspeth and Ravyn have gathered most of the twelve Providence Cards, but the last—and most important—one remains to be found: the Twin Alders. If they’re going to find the card before Solstice and set free the kingdom, they will need to journey through the dangerous mist-cloaked forest. The only one who can lead them through is the monster that shares Elspeth’s head: the Nightmare.

With the full realization of her inheritance before her, Georgia Carpenter is overwhelmed by the generosity of her late great aunt. What lays ahead of Georgia, however, is more work than she’s ever done in her life. Then another family member arrives unexpectedly, and things change in a way she never imagined possible. But what’s another curveball in the crazy game of life? She thinks she can handle everything being thrown at her, along with the help of Travis Taylor, the handsome handyman she inherited from aunt.

With the storm behind her, Georgia Carpenter looks forward to reaching her goal of reopening the inn left to her by her great aunt. It seems very attainable, too, thanks to all the help she’s been getting from family and friends. She and Travis Taylor, her handsome handyman, seem to be on a good path, as well. In fact, everything is going swimmingly until a rival in town does the unthinkable and creates all kinds of chaos.

Nina and Simon are the perfect couple. Young, fun and deeply in love. Until they leave for a weekend at his family’s cabin in Vermont, and only Simon comes home.

Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunder—she needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head. He protects her. He keeps her secrets. But nothing comes for free, especially magic. When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure Blunder from the dark magic infecting it.

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

Mickey Gibson, mother and former detective, leads a hectic life similar to that of many moms: juggling the demands of her two small children with the tasks of her job working remotely for ProEye, a global investigation company that hunts down wealthy tax and credit cheats. When Mickey gets a call from a colleague named Arlene Robinson, she thinks nothing of Arlene’s unusual request for her to go inventory the vacant home of an arms dealer who cheated ProEye’s clients and fled. That is, until she arrives at the mansion to discover a dead body in a secret room—and that nothing is as it seems.

New beginnings await Georgia Carpenter as opening day for the Sea Glass Inn approaches. It’s all very exciting, but there are a million things to be done. And a million fires to be put out. With the constant reminder that nothing good ever comes easy, she and Travis Taylor, her handsome handyman, conquer each problem that arises, bringing them closer than ever before. But is it all happening too fast? Georgia isn’t sure, and doubts begin to creep in. Maybe it’s time to put the brakes on things. Or is she letting her past dictate her future?

With a hurricane barreling toward Blackbird Beach, Georgia Carpenter is faced with new problems and the need to work faster than ever. The last thing she needs is more damage to the inn, but she can’t control nature. What she can control is how the people around her weather that storm. In a bid to protect those she loves, she pulls them all close, opening her new home as a place of shelter. Everything’s going fine, too, until the man she’s falling for, Travis Taylor, reveals he has a storm of his own going on. Will the changes in his life mean changes in Georgia’s too?

TJ Devlin is the charming disappointment in the prominent Devlin family, all of whom are lawyers at their highly successful firm—except him. After a stint in prison and rehab for alcoholism, TJ can’t get hired anywhere except at the firm, in a make-work job with the title of investigator. But one night, TJ’s world turns upside down after his older brother John confesses that he murdered one of their clients, an accountant he’d confronted with proof of embezzlement. It seems impossible coming from John, the firstborn son and Most Valuable Devlin.

Georgia Carpenter is hard at work on rehabbing her inherited inn with the goal of reopening as soon as possible. A goal that seems very attainable with the help of handsome handyman Travis Taylor and her family. But she wasn’t counting on her estranged sister, Lilly, showing up. Georgia and Lilly have never really seen eye-to-eye about anything, and Georgia worries that Lilly will cause trouble when she realizes their great aunt didn’t include Lilly in her will.

From the best-selling author of Before We Were Yours comes a dramatic historical novel of three young women searching for family amid the destruction of the post-Civil War South, and of a modern-day teacher who learns of their story and its vital connection to her students’ lives.

In teenagers, powerful emotions come with the territory. And with so many of today’s teens contending with academic pressure, social media stress, worries about the future, and concerns about their own mental health, it’s easy for them—and their parents—to feel anxious and overwhelmed. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With clear, research-informed explanations alongside illuminating, real-life examples, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers gives parents the information they need to steady their teens through the bumpy yet transformational journey into adulthood.