Favorite Wife

His Favorite Wife is the heart-stopping, inspirational narrative of a courageous, fifteen year-old girl who becomes the sixth wife in a polygamous marriage and the infamous Ervil LeBaron became her brother-in-law. Cascading with rich, well-developed characters, this true story will capture your soul and imagination as the author reveals how a group of kind-hearted, sincere people are led to embrace this controversial lifestyle in their pursuit of the highest degree of glory. Laced with surprising brush-strokes of humor, this heart-rending saga will take its readers on a journey that outsiders whisper of and shudder about. It answers the question that a polygamist's wife is asked countless times: How can you tolerate sharing your husband?

A riveting memoir of life inside one of North America's most notorious polygamous cults.

On Tang Kexin's birthday, her boyfriend and sister were accompanying her. After drinking a cup of wine, she threw herself into her boyfriend's embrace. But when she woke up, she found herself in a dark place with a stranger next to her.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was 14 years old when I went to church with my family in 1968. I was so excited to see the flowers and trees in bloom, and the prosperity of the colony. I was beautiful as the desert blossoms around me. #2 I was six when my father moved my mother and five youngest siblings away from Utah and the traditional Mormon Church. We joined a group of fundamentalist pioneers who were not afraid to live the teachings of Joseph Smith to their fullest. #3 I was excited to see my sister Fara, but I was also dreading the fact that I would have to babysit Thelma during church. I was tired of being the built-in babysitter. #4 I was studying the church patriarch, Ervil LeBaron, as the congregation began singing the opening hymn. His cool, blue-gray eyes roamed the crowd, measuring people’s abilities and weaknesses. I was not sure what his job entailed, but I knew he was a master at preaching from the books that the church considered scripture.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER A PENGUIN BOOK CLUB PICK "Recipe for a Perfect Wife is a bold, intoxicating, page-turner. Karma Brown has long been a favorite of mine and this book is proof she just keeps getting better and better. This is a thrilling, audacious story about women daring to take control."--Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones and the Six When Alice Hale reluctantly leaves a promising career in publicity, following her husband to the New York suburbs, she is unaccustomed to filling her days alone in a big, empty house. However, she is determined to become a writer--and to work hard to build the kind of life her husband dreams of, complete with children. At first, the old house seems to resent Alice as much as she resents it, but when she finds an old cookbook buried in a box in the basement, she becomes captivated by the cookbook's previous owner: 1950s housewife Nellie Murdoch. As Alice cooks her way through the past, she begins to settle into her new surroundings, even as her friends and family grow concerned that she has embraced them too fully: wearing vintage dresses and pearls like a 1950s housewife, making elaborate old-fashioned dishes like Baked Alaska, and drifting steadily away from her usual pursuits. Alice justifies the changes merely as research for her novel...but when she discovers that Nellie left clues about her own life within the cookbook's pages--and in a mysterious series of unsent letters penned to Nellie's mother--she quickly realizes that the housewife's secrets may have been anything but harmless. As she uncovers a more sinister side to Nellie's marriage and with pressure mounting in her own relationship, Alice realizes that to protect herself she must harbour and hatch a few secrets of her own...

The world-wide, mega selling author of Man and Boy is back with a sizzling, Shanghai tale of sex, romance and second wives

A memoir in essays that expands on the viral sensation “The Crane Wife” with a frank and funny look at love, intimacy, and self in the twenty-first century. From friends and lovers to blood family and chosen family, this “elegant masterpiece” (Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger) asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer ​us all. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, THE GUARDIAN, GARDEN & GUN "Hauser builds their life's inventory out of deconstructed personal narratives, resulting in a reading experience that's rich like a complicated dessert—not for wolfing down but for savoring in small bites." —The New York Times “Hauser’s wry, introspective investigation of their assumptions about love will likely free readers to examine their own personal narratives as well ... ‘The rare happy ending I appreciate is one that makes room for the whole painful fact of the world at the same time it offers the reader some joy,’ they write. The Crane Wife embraces this philosophy again and again as Hauser excavates their past loves and losses, thoughtfully examines them and declares the pain of love to be worth the risk.” —BookPage Ten days after calling off their wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, they realized they'd almost signed up to live someone else's life. Hauser releases themself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way. They kiss Internet strangers and officiates at a wedding. They reread Rebecca in the house their boyfriend once shared with his ex-wife and rewinds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to learn how not to lose yourself in a relationship. They think about Florence Nightingale at a robot convention and grief at John Belushi’s rock and roll gravesite, and the difference between those stories we’re asked to hold versus those we choose to carry. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, The Crane Wife is a book for everyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.

Ann Eliza Young (née Webb) was one of Brigham Young's many wives and later a critic of polygamy and a U.S. Mormon dissident. She was the 19th, or possibly 27th, wife of Brigham Young, the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, having married him when he was 67 years old and she was a 24 year old divorcee with two children. She filed for divorce from Young in January 1873, an act which attracted much attention. Her bill for divorce alleged neglect, cruel treatment, and desertion, and claimed that her husband had property worth $8,000,000 and an income exceeding $40,000 a month. (Young countered that he owned less than $600,000 in property and that his income was less than $6000 per month.) Ann Eliza Young subsequently went around the country speaking out against polygamy, Mormonism, and even Brigham Young himself.