Something Unbelievable

An overwhelmed new mom discovers unexpected parallels between life in twenty-first-century America and her grandmother’s account of their family’s escape from the Nazis in this sharp, heartfelt novel. “A fresh perspective—one that’s both haunting and hilarious—on dual-timeline war stories, a feat that only a writer of Kuznetsova’s caliber could pull off.”—Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue Larissa is a stubborn, brutally honest woman in her eighties, tired of her home in Kiev, Ukraine—tired of everything really, except for her beloved granddaughter, Natasha. Natasha is tired as well, but that’s because she just had a baby, and she’s struggling to balance her roles as a new mother, a wife, a struggling actress, and a host to her husband’s slacker best friend, Stas, who has been staying with them in their cramped one-bedroom apartment in upper Manhattan. When Natasha asks Larissa to tell the story of her family’s Soviet wartime escape from the Nazis in Kiev, she reluctantly agrees. Maybe Natasha is just looking for distraction from her own life, but Larissa is desperate to make her happy, even though telling the story makes her heart ache. Larissa recounts the nearly three-year period when she fled with her self-absorbed sister, parents, and grandmother to a factory town in the Ural Mountains where they faced starvation, a cholera outbreak, a tragic suicide, and where she was torn in her affections for two brothers from a wealthy family. But neither Larissa nor Natasha can anticipate how loudly these lessons of the past will echo in their present moments. Something Unbelievable explores with piercing wit and tender feeling just how much our circumstances shape our lives and what we pass on to the younger generations, willingly or not.

An overwhelmed new mom discovers unexpected parallels between life in twenty-first-century America and her grandmother’s account of their family’s escape from the Nazis in this sharp, heartfelt novel. “A fresh perspective—one that’s both haunting and hilarious—on dual-timeline war stories, a feat that only a writer of Kuznetsova’s caliber could pull off.”—Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue Larissa is a stubborn, brutally honest woman in her eighties, tired of her home in Kiev, Ukraine—tired of everything really, except for her beloved granddaughter, Natasha. Natasha is tired as well, but that’s because she just had a baby, and she’s struggling to balance her roles as a new mother, a wife, a struggling actress, and a host to her husband’s slacker best friend, Stas, who has been staying with them in their cramped one-bedroom apartment in upper Manhattan. When Natasha asks Larissa to tell the story of her family’s Soviet wartime escape from the Nazis in Kiev, she reluctantly agrees. Maybe Natasha is just looking for distraction from her own life, but Larissa is desperate to make her happy, even though telling the story makes her heart ache. Larissa recounts the nearly three-year period when she fled with her self-absorbed sister, parents, and grandmother to a factory town in the Ural Mountains where they faced starvation, a cholera outbreak, a tragic suicide, and where she was torn in her affections for two brothers from a wealthy family. But neither Larissa nor Natasha can anticipate how loudly these lessons of the past will echo in their present moments. Something Unbelievable explores with piercing wit and tender feeling just how much our circumstances shape our lives and what we pass on to the younger generations, willingly or not.

Conversations matter. Yet, recently, good conversations about faith have been increasingly squeezed out of the public sphere. Seeking to reopen the debate, Justin Brierley began to invite atheists and sceptics on to Premier Christian Radio to air arguments for and against the Christian faith. But how has ten years of discussion with atheists affected the presenter’s faith? Reflecting on conversations with Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown and many more, Justin explains why he still finds Christianity the most compelling explanation for life, the universe and everything. And why, regardless of belief or background, we should all welcome the conversation. ‘Beautifully written, brilliantly argued, Justin’s book will thrill Christians and challenge atheists.’ R. T. Kendall, author and pastor ‘Justin has that happy knack of being able to get people of diametrically opposed opinions debating the big issues.’ John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics, University of Oxford

In The Unbelievable Gospel pastor Jonathan Dodson diagnoses the evangelistic paralysis of the modern church, pinpointing the reasons people don’t share their faith today and offering a desperately needed solution. Showing readers how to utilize the rich gospel metaphors found in Scripture and how to communicate a gospel worth believing—one that speaks to the heart-felt needs of diverse individuals—Dodson connects the gospel to the real issues people face each day by speaking to both the head and the heart. Filled with stories that reveal the long road of relational evangelism and guidance on how to listen to others well, The Unbelievable Gospel is a much-needed resource that will benefit both individuals and churches. Included are study questions for training and group discussion.

My name is Addie and I am the daughter of Queen Elizabeth Henderson, and my mother have ten (10) children that she raise under a very racial white conditions in Memphis Tennessee. So I ran away from the South to the North as a young girl because I wanted my freedom and rights to make my own choices. But when I return back to Memphis Tennessee I brought back with me a ferocity that is unmatched in my family. See my story is a true story about my Negro family in the South. Because I have grow past this slavery and racial white conditions that I was born under in Mississippi at my time of birth, and now I have produce life myself as a Creator on earth, and some of the white peoples have change in the South a lot by initial conditions.

Something We Never Imagined is a story about an intriguing country boy named Colton Dust who moves to Los Angeles to study journalism at USC after graduating from high school in his small hometown. A few years after graduating with a degree in journalism, he finds himself quickly rising up the ranks as a news columnist in LA when his first column at a smaller newspaper catches the eye of the Editor in Chief at the largest newspaper in LA. However, just as he is finally achieving success in his career, he happens to meet a beautiful young woman named Emma Lee Coal who begins to stir something inside of him he had not felt in a long time, but in order to open his heart, he has to encounter a painful experience still haunting him from his past. Even though Emma Lee is initially enchanted by his charming looks, she quickly finds him a bit brash and self-centered. Yet, she also finds herself intrigued to learn more about why he believes what he does, she just isn’t sure if she’ll ever see him again after their first encounter. Then after a twist of fate brings the two of them together again, she begins to help him experience the healing power of forgiveness, but as his life hits a crossroad point, he must decide if he truly has faith and trust in God in order to experience something he never could have imagined.

“[The] Ukrainian American heroine of this sweet-bitter debut is a wisecracking fatalist who can be counted on to say the inappropriate thing, a tendency that becomes more pronounced as doomed crushes and family crises pile up on the road to adulthood.”—O: The Oprah Magazine When Oksana and her family move from the Ukraine to Florida to begin a new American life, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her cranky mother sits at home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets from men. All Oksana wants is to be as far away from her family as possible, to have friends, and to be normal—and though she constantly tries to do the right thing, she keeps getting in trouble. As she grows up, she continues to misbehave, from somewhat accidentally maiming the school-bus bully, to stealing the much-coveted key to New York City’s Gramercy Park, to falling in love with a married man. After her grandmother moves back to Ukraine, Oksana longs for the motherland that looms large in her imagination but is a country she never really knew. When she visits her grandmother in Yalta and learns about her romantic past, Oksana comes to a new understanding of how to live without causing harm to the people she loves. But will Oksana ever quite learn to behave? Praise for Oksana, Behave! “Tragicomic and bittersweet . . . an immigrant's coming-of-age tale done with brio.”—Kirkus Reviews “What luck for readers that Oksana can’t behave! Little devil, infinite imbecile, poor futureless child—all the names her displaced, loving family give to her as she crashes and burns and wanders the wilderness of her inheritance, fit perfectly. As outrageous as she is, as funny and as awful as she can be, though, in Oksana, Maria Kuznetsova has also created a character of great passion and depth—of tragedy, even, too—the very sort that populate the stories of Chekhov and Tolstoy, the poems of Anna Akhmatova, and all the other Russian writers Oksana looks to for comfort and company and some sort of bearing in this absurd world. This novel is a stark, hilarious delight.”—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers

What do you really want—isn’t it happiness? And what keeps you from being happy? Could it be that your need to cling so tightly to what you believe—about yourself and life, about how things should be—is what’s holding you back? In The Unbelievable Happiness of What Is, a contemporary spiritual teacher in the non-duality tradition reveals how confronting and letting go of our negative beliefs about ourselves and the world ultimately sets us on the path toward an awakened life of profound joy, meaning, and purpose. We all want peace and freedom and love and happiness, we all want to be fulfilled, but so many of us fail to reach the level of contentment we’ve built up in our minds, often believing there’s something wrong with us and blaming ourselves, others, or circumstances for our perceived lack of accomplishment or satisfaction. But the truth is, happiness is not something you have to get or achieve, because it’s something you already have—in fact, it’s what you already are. With this book, author Jon Bernie—counselor, healer, and teacher in the lineage of Adyashanti—sheds light on the struggle to find happiness, showing how our unexamined beliefs distort our identities and make us suffer by creating unconscious tension in our bodies and minds. You’ll learn how to bring awareness to these patterns and begin to unravel the tightly held, negative beliefs that have overshadowed your existence, finally moving through them and into a brightening of experience and the realization of true happiness, liberation, peace, and fulfillment. Using this compassionate, heart-centered approach, you’ll work with your feelings rather than resist them, and find guidance and support in surrendering to the relief of not knowing. You’ll also learn to relax into and live as awareness in your day-to-day life. Most importantly, you’ll discover that which you’ve been seeking but has never really been out of reach—something that is, indeed, beyond belief: the unbelievable happiness of accepting what is.