Midnight Memories Inside The Back Road Caf

Dale Rominger has lived a full life, rich with experiences garnered from his international travels. In a collection of essays, reflections, and meditations, Rominger captures memories from his childhood and a career that took him around the world and places them alongside musings on his favorite books, films, and television shows. In his writings, Rominger begins with three short essays that reveal his diverse thoughts about memories, and then shares chronological reflections that contemplate the meaning of poverty; rant about guns and fame; pay homage to the influence of scientists, philosophers, screenwriters, and storytellers; collect thoughts about human worth, life, and death; and document his travels as history and politics unfolded from adventures across the world stage. Throughout his ponderances, Rominger views the troubles of the world with clarity while reminding us that we are more alike than different, no matter where we live or what we believe. Midnight Memories Inside the Back Road Café shares musings on memory, language, love, and meaning that reflect on a lifetime of treasured relationships and experiences.

Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Café unfolds. As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences. Written in spare, intimate prose, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled longings and unspoken secrets.

'Breathtaking untold story . . . riotously colourful' Mail on Sunday 'I read most of it in one exciting sitting. It is brilliant, gripping and sad' Harry Mount Restoration Heart is a story of love, double divorce and redemption. It is a biography of the heart, and of a house. When William Cash suffers a post-divorce, mid-life breakdown, aged 43, life seemed bleak - but things were about to change. Like William himself, his old Shropshire family house Upton Cressett was in as much in need of being rescued and 'fixed up' as its owner. As William embarks on re-building his life and ruin of a country house, he starts looking again for love. But money, patience and the likelihood of ever finding family happiness soon start to run out. Drawing on his haul of letters written to various wives, fiancées and girlfriends - all potential third wives - the book follows Cash's search for a chatelaine for Upton Cressett. Restoration Heart is a tempestuous, Gulliver-like voyage of the heart with a colourful cast of figures including Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Hurley, David Hockney, Piers Morgan, an American singer legend cousin and, most dramatically, future prime minister Boris Johnson. Hilarious and poignant, this 'restore-a-wreck' memoir is an account of how an Englishman is rescued by love, architecture and beauty. The memoir also holds up a dark lens to the Bonfire of the Vanities generation that Cash was a member of at Cambridge. The story reveals how a broken man can become completely transformed - both emotionally and imaginatively - by a building and its surrounding landscape. During the four year refurbishment, the house's reclamation becomes inexorably linked with his own re-birth and salvation before he finally marries for the third time and gets to live in his family house. This is not a misery-memoir; it is an uplifting - albeit tempestuous - Gulliver-like biography of the heart with an ancient Elizabethan house as the writer's Arcadian safe house and source of salvation.

Readers have fallen in love with Jodi Thomas’s Honey Creek series, featuring an “inviting setting and quirky, good-hearted characters” (Publishers Weekly). With tender romance, adventure, and a touch of mystery, Sunday at the Sunflower Inn is comfort reading at its best, bringing together a cast of endearing locals in intertwined stories perfect for fans of Robyn Carr, Susan Mallery, Susan Wiggs, and Debbie Macomber. Jessica Ann MacKenzie—“Jam” to everyone in Honey Creek—has fulfilled her dream of owning the best restaurant for miles around. Serving romantic candlelit dinners on Valentine’s Day is a reminder of another dream, one she’s just about given up on. Until, that very night, Sergeant Tucson Smith clambers out of the muddy river and onto her land, bringing the promise of something they’ve both been searching for. When McCoy Mason crashes on Interstate 45, he doesn’t just bust up his Mustang, his leg, and his relationship. He also loses his prospects of a job and apartment in Houston. Honey Creek, home to his estranged grandfather, offers a temporary respite. After all, what permanent use could a town so picture-perfect have for a man like him? At sixty-seven, Charles H. Winston III lives by order and routine. One of his cherished rituals is a regular lunch date with three lovely ladies at the Honey Creek Café, including the very proper Miss Lilly Lambert. But it’s not too late to surprise the whole town—or himself—by seizing a chance for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. And there’s no better season than spring, a time of renewed hope and second chances . . .

In the aftermath of an apparent terrorist attack, the headquarters of an American oil company haemorrhages chemical-pink smoke into the Moscow smog. A Russian army captain carrying a priceless Fabergé egg and digital evidence of horrific wartime atrocities is murdered and relieved of both these prizes. And in the snowy mountains of southern Russia, a terrorist named Abreg-who once held Volk captive in a Chechen mud pit-hatches a plan to lure him back into his grasp. Shadow of the Wolf finds covert agent Colonel Alexei Volkovoy grieving for his lost love, Valya, and struggling to stay afloat in a world of political intrigue and underground plots. But when he takes out his anger on the wrong man, he gains a powerful enemy in the highest reaches of the Kremlin...

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

An inspired observer of the Indian psyche, Sudhir Kakar trained as a psychoanalyst at the Sigmund Freud Institute, Frankfurt. He set up a clinic in Delhi in 1975, thus embarking on a lifelong search for the wellsprings of Indian identity. He went on to establish the new discipline of cultural psychology. A Book of Memory records not only the crises of identity and intellect, but also the highs and lows of love and pleasure. It is fearless and revelatory with regard to the self and its motivations, a rare candour illuminating the urbane prose.

From the award-winning author of Minor Characters comes a haunting novel about the persistence of love and the sustaining and destabilizing power of memories In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art world of the 1960s, where men and women collide in “lucky and unlucky convergences,” a series of love affairs has left Joanna Gold, a young photographer, feeling numbed. Then, at yet another party, a painter named Tom Murphy walks up to her. “Why do you hang back?” he asks. Rather than another brief collision, their relationship is the profound and ecstatic love each had longed to find. But it’s undermined by Tom’s harrowing past—his fatherless childhood, his wartime experiences, and most of all, the loss of the two children he left behind in Florida, along with the powerful red, white, and black paintings he will never set eyes on again. Tom, both tender and volatile, draws Joanna into the unwinnable struggle against the forces that drive him toward death. Once again, Joyce Johnson brings to life a mythic bohemian world where art is everything and life is as full of intensity and risk as the bold sweep of a painter’s brush across a canvas. A New York Times Notable Book Excerpted in the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine