A Life Without Flowers

Twenty-four years after losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Carol Denman has finally made peace with Katie’s father. But releasing her ex-husband from blame and facing how deeply she held herself responsible were only the first steps in Carol’s journey toward peace. With the pain of her failed first marriage behind her, Carol is determined to mend her broken relationship with her mother. But she soon discovers she isn’t the only one who has been hanging on to bitterness. A road trip to face the past leads Carol’s mother, Judith, to unearth the seeds of past mistakes and deep resentments in ways neither of them would expect. The roots of family animosity run deep and thick. While Judith seems hesitant to start digging, Carol commits to pruning away the thorns of the past so she no longer has to live a life without flowers.

Carol Denman divorced her husband over twenty years ago and has never looked back. But on the day before their daughter’s thirtieth birthday, John barges back into Carol’s life with a request that threatens the fragile stability she has built. John Bowman is sick. Very sick. While he still can, he has some amends to make and some promises to fulfill. But to do that, he not only needs his ex-wife’s agreement…he needs her. With the past hovering between them like a ghost, Carol and John embark on a decades-overdue road trip. Together they plunge back into a life without water…but which may ultimately set them free.

"A Life Without Regrets is the perfect ending to a perfect series." ~Dauntless Novels "This is a book I will think about for a long time." ~Bookbubbe "Not just for women's fiction fans, but for everyone who enjoys a heroine who digs deep to find the ability to survive and flourish with grace." ~ PW Reader Since losing her husband, Tobias, in a tragic accident, Carol Denman has been on a journey of self-growth. She’s taken steps to finally grieve her daughter’s death, forgive her first husband, and mend her broken relationship with her mother. The one heartbreak she can’t seem to come to terms with is losing her husband. As Carol continues her travels, family, old friends, and new confidants want to help her heal. However, this is a path Carol must travel alone. She knows her husband would want her to be happy again. She just has to figure out how to move forward. Carol must dig deep to find a way back to the peace and happiness she once had in her life with Tobias. Coming to terms with being a widow isn’t going to be easy, but with the support from her loved ones and a few strangers, Carol embarks on her most poignant journey yet—finding a life without regrets.

“A flower is not a flower alone; a thousand thoughts invest it.” Daffodils signal new beginnings, daisies innocence. Lilacs mean the first emotions of love, periwinkles tender recollection. Early Victorians used flowers as a way to express their feelings—love or grief, jealousy or devotion. Now, modern-day romantics are enjoying a resurgence of this bygone custom, and this book will share the historical, literary, and cultural significance of flowers with a whole new generation. With lavish illustrations, a dual dictionary of flora and meanings, and suggestions for creating expressive arrangements, this keepsake is the perfect compendium for everyone who has ever given or received a bouquet.

A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother’s life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history. “A candid and achingly fractured memoir of [Geller’s] mother, her family, her Navajo heritage and her own journey to self-discovery and acceptance.”—Ms. SHORTLISTED FOR: The Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, The Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Esquire, She Reads When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother’s life to try and understand her mother’s relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it. Geller embarks on a journey where she confronts her family's history and the decisions that she herself had been forced to make while growing up, a journey that will end at her mother's home: the Navajo reservation. Dog Flowers is an arresting, photo-lingual memoir that masterfully weaves together images and text to examine mothers and mothering, sisters and caretaking, and colonized bodies. Exploring loss and inheritance, beauty and balance, Danielle Geller pays homage to our pasts, traditions, and heritage, to the families we are given and the families we choose.

Our ultimate happiness depends on the balance of four key elements in our lives: Spirituality, Family and Relationships, Hobbies and Interests, and Health. Let this compilation of essay-style memoirs be your guide as you tread along your life path with fulfillment. The four key elements in our lives seem to be synonymous with the four seasons. Spirituality represents the spring, where the fresh energy of the spirit makes all things new with endless possibilities. Hobbies and Interests represents the summer, where the warmth of the sun and the fresh summer breeze stirs us to do the things we most love. Family and Relationships is the fall, where the whipping wind and the leaves blowing down the road remind us of where we come from, where we have been, and the power of love. Health is like winter, just as quiet as our immune system silently neutralizing invaders, or our heart beating day in and day out, without any conscious thought. What speaks to you? Where do your talents lie? What are you here to do? Are you on the right path? Only you know the answers. The extraordinary beauty found in these stories of everyday life can remind you of your purpose and bring you closer to happiness.

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARD NOVEL OF THE YEAR Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Awards “Mr. Ryan writes conspicuously beautiful prose… The fleeting happiness and abiding melancholy of the asymmetry, heightened by the intimately rendered surroundings, brings out Mr. Ryan’s most sensuous and emotive writing.” –The Wall Street Journal From the Booker nominated author of The Queen of Dirt Island, Donal Ryan's new novel follows the Gladney family across three generations seeking the true meaning of what it is to find home and love. In 1973, twenty-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home in Ireland and disappears. Bewildered and distraught, Paddy and Kit must confront an unbearable prospect: that they will never see their daughter again. Five years later, Moll returns from London. What - and who - she brings with her will change the course of her family's life forever. Beautiful and devastating, this exploration of loss, alienation and the redemptive power of love reaffirms Donal Ryan as one of the most talented and empathetic writers at work today.