Open Arms

An intriguing novel with a classic feel, featuring three vividly alive young sisters, an eccentric family struggling against the odds, and the slowly revealed story of a house with a past.

Freehand Books is pleased to be bringing back to print the widely acclaimed first novel by the author of the Giller-shortlisted Good to a Fault, Marina Endicott. Open Arms is a contemporary quest story set in Saskatoon and featuring a protagonist whose spirit is as strong as her heart is broken. Seventeen-year-old Bessie Smith Connolly, the daughter of a rock-singer mother and absentee poet father, must navigate grief and betrayal, making her way through her exploded family and out into the world. Open Arms was a finalist for the 2002 Amazon-Books in Canada First Novel Award and broadcast on CBC Radio’s Between the Covers.

Kate Thompson - glamorous housewife-turned-MP - surprises everyone with her meteoric rise at Westminster. When Kate is sent as a trade minister to India, she hopes it will be her moment to shine. But, embroiled in a personal scandal, she gets drawn into a dangerous world of corruption and political intrigue... Billionaire Deepak Parrikar - head of an Indian arms technology company - is magnetically drawn to the beautiful British minister. But while their relationship deepens, India's hostilities with Pakistan reach boiling point, causing more than just business and politics to collide. In the race to prevent disaster, can their conflicting loyalties survive being tested to the limit? Open Arms is an explosive thriller which circles from Whitehall to the slums of Mumbai. Cable's sweeping tale combines unrivalled political detail with international intrigue, desire, and the quest for power. An electrifying debut.

The author of The Blue Cotton Gown recounts living free and naturally against all odds—and discovering her true calling as a midwife—in this deeply moving memoir In her first, highly praised memoir, Patricia Harman told us the stories patients brought into her exam room, and her own story of struggling to help women as a nurse-midwife in medical practice with her husband—an OB/GYN—in Appalachia. Now, Patsy reaches back to the 1960s and 1970s, recounting how she learned to deliver babies and her youthful experiments with living a fully sustainable, natural life. Drawing heavily on her journals, Arms Wide Open goes back to a time of counter-culture idealism that the boomer generation remembers well. Patsy opens with stories of living in the wilds of Minnesota in a log cabin she and her lover build with their own hands, the only running water being the nearby streams. They set up beehives and give chase to a bear competing for the honey. Patsy gives birth and learns to help her friends deliver as naturally as possible. Weary of the cold and isolation, Patsy moves to a commune in West Virginia, where she becomes a self-taught midwife delivering babies in cabins and homes. Her stories sparkle with drama and intensity, but she wants to help more women than healthy hippie homesteaders. After a ten-year sojourn for professional training, Patsy and her husband return to Appalachia, where they set up a women's health practice. They deliver babies together—this time in hospitals—and care for a wide variety of gyn patients. They live in a lakeside contemporary home, though their hearts are still firmly implanted in nature. The obstetrical climate is changing. The Harmans' family is changing. The earth is changing—but Patsy's arms remain wide open to life and all it offers. Her memoir of living free and sustainably against all odds will be especially embraced by anyone who lived through the Vietnam War and commune era, and all those involved in the back-to-nature and natural-childbirth movements.

Everyone says Kathleen Monroe is perfect--the perfect wife, the perfect hostess, the perfect mother. But after a lifetime of practice, Kathleen is beginning to wonder if perfectionism is a good thing. After all, it didn't help her marriage and might just have led to her daughter's illness. And if those aren't enough reasons for her to doubt her priorities, then meeting Logan Carr should be.

A bird's eye view of a group of people undertaking major change, this is the story of one child psychiatric unit and a profound questioning of the humanity of current practice in child welfare. It offers the experience of building, through collaborative effort, a child and family-centered care facility as an alternative to the existing model.

(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). This artist-approved songbook features great photos, an extensive interview, and 21 top hits from Journey: Any Way You Want It * Don't Stop Believin' * Faithfully * Lights * Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin' * Oh Sherrie * Open Arms * Send Her My Love * Wheel in the Sky * Who's Crying Now * and more.

Fleeing the guilts of his youth, Lieutenant Leslie Deacon has escaped to hide in the army and the vast rock deserts of a scorched and war-ravaged Aden . Adoo rebels hurl grenades from the shadows and a hard-pressed British Army is struggling to keep order and control. When the Adoo bring the war inside the city, a new guerrilla warfare is needed to keep the rebels at bay and the garrison and its civilians safe. Into this fearful, threatened city comes the adventurer Clemmie Ross and the charismatic Captain Villiers. Deacon's world of duty, honour, courage and love begins to explode and fragment about him. In Aden's scorched deserts and bombed streets, duty only brings death, and honour offers no reward. Only through love will Deacon find peace. All he has to do is find it.