Hard Land

Falling Water is the second installment in the riveting Hard Land adventure and survival series. Set along the rugged North American Pacific Coast in the early nineteenth century, John and Erin Daly live a hardscrabble life, scratching out a subsistence existence while fending off nature’s predators and the elements. Their love and faith and the local Native tribe are the bedrock of their survival until challenged by outlaws, a wicked Native witch, and a horrifying demon. The allure of gold weaves through twisting plots and schemes, drawing all participants in this exciting tale to a hidden valley where a final battle of good versus evil erupts. Descriptive panoramas of endless forests, towering mountains, and tumbling waterfalls are the backdrop through all facets of the book. The deep beauty of coastal redwood forests and rugged coastlines provide stunning imagery. The story is colored with early American pioneering customs, skills, and ways of life. Native American symbolism, shamanism, and customs are explored. This captivating tale is one of adventure, excitement, and the supernatural that builds upon itself from one gripping scene to the next only to reach a thrilling and surprising conclusion.

Lissa Bauer has always been careful to hide the hurts of her past, knowing that showing her pain won't help her acting career. Now it's her big break, playing the compelling, hardscrabble heroine of Matthew Briggs's stunning novel, A High, Hard Land. As Lissa struggles with her complex feelings for the story's enigmatic hero, however, she's not capturing her role to Matthew's satisfaction. He-as well as his hero-is playing havoc with her deepest emotions.

A true story of 2 brothers growing up in Roundup, Montana during 20's and 30's.

“One of the top standalone Westerns in 2022.” —True West magazine Arizona Territory, 1899. Ruby Fortune faces an untenable choice: murder her abusive husband or continue to live with bruises that never heal. One bullet is all it takes. Once known as “Girl Wonder” on the Wild West circuit, Ruby is now a single mother of four boys in her hometown of Jericho, an end-of-the-world mining town north of Tucson. Here, Ruby opens a roadside inn to make ends meet. Drifters, grifters, con men, and prostitutes plow through the hotel’s doors, and their escapades pepper the local newspaper like buckshot. An affair with an African American miner puts Ruby’s life and livelihood at risk, but she can’t let him go. Not until a trio of disparate characters—her dead husband’s sister, a vindictive shopkeeper, and the local mine owner she once swindled—threaten to ruin her does Ruby face the consequences of her choices; but as usual, she does what she needs to in order to provide for herself and her sons. Set against the breathtaking beauty of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert and bursting with Wild West imagery, history, suspense, and adventure, Hardland serves up a tough, fast-talking, shoot-from-the-hip heroine who goes to every length to survive and carve out a life for herself and her sons in one of the harshest places in the American West.

A retrospective of cowboy life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Utah, with rare antique sepia photos.

"From internationally bestselling author Benedict Wells, a sweeping, heartbreaking novel of friendship, memory, and the lives we never get to live "[D]azzling storytelling...The End of Loneliness is both affecting and accomplished -- and eternal."--John Irving At eleven years old, Jules Moreau loses his parents in a tragic accident, and in an instant, his childhood is shattered. Leaving a comfortable home in Munich and holidays in the south of France far behind, he and his siblings, Marty and Liz, are enrolled in a bleak boarding school, where the trio begin to lose each other, as well as themselves. Marty throws himself into academic life; Liz is drawn to dark forms of escapism; and Jules, though once vivacious and fearless, turns inward, becoming a ghost of his former self...until he meets Alva. Shy, intelligent, and enigmatic, and concealing a dark childhood of her own, Alva pulls Jules out of his shell and the two bond over books and writing, always with an unspoken understanding of the other's pain. Eight years later, at the precipice of their friendship becoming more, Alva abruptly turns her back, and the two leave school on separate paths. As they enter adulthood, Jules, Marty, and Liz, still strangers to one another, struggle to contend with who they are becoming. Jules is adrift, growing into a directionless young man, anchored only by two desires: to be a writer, and to have Alva back in his life. It isn't until Liz hits rock bottom that the three siblings finally find their footing as a family, and Jules finds the nerve to reach out to Alva -- fifteen years after they last spoke. Invited by Alva to join her and her husband, an esteemed author, at their home in Switzerland, Jules finds his way back to his own writing, and to his closest friend. As life begins to fall into place, just as it seems that they can make amends for time wasted, the past catches up with them, and fate -- or chance -- once again intervenes. A kaleidoscopic and heartfelt family saga, as well as a deeply felt meditation on the power of memory, The End of Loneliness explores the invisible forces and currents that can change our lives in an instant, and asks us all to consider, If you spend all your life running in the wrong direction, could it be the right one after all?"--

Considers the national and international ramifications of U.S. ABM deployment, and its effects on SALT talks with the Soviet Union.