The Broken Tree

All families have stories and all families have secrets. Some stories can be hidden forever. Others come out over time, or suddenly through revelation. With the advent of easy to obtain and cheap DNA kits, more and more people are stumbling across biological secrets they never suspected, sometimes with happy outcomes, but sometimes with shocking results. In this book, the author provides a real-life example of the shocking revelations and aftermath of DNA investigation. Growing up as one of nine children, Stephen Anderson suspected from a young age that something was amiss. A chance accident, and a small crack in the history of his family broke open. More would come to be revealed as the author sets out on a journey to find answers to his questions. Any reader wondering what a DNA test might reveal will find here one extreme example of family secrets gone awry. As each member learns more about his or her own identity, new family members pop up, fade out, or pass away before relationships can be established or even revealed. More and more people are undergoing DNA tests and seeking to find long lost relatives though ancestry searches. What they find might upturn all their shared assumptions about family, identity, belonging, and history. Join Stephen as he uncovers his own family’s secrets, the impact they’ve had on his life and his family’s, and what they are all doing now to heal fresh wounds.

The Broken Leaf invites you to explore the beauty and gospel images found in Japanese art and culture. Through ten short meditations, discover for yourself just how God might be revealing his story in the everyday objects of your life whenever and wherever you may be.

As she was growing up, Anita Venes forgot many things about her origins – who she was, where everybody else was, why she had a strange name which people kept changing. She worked hard to forget about the past, avoiding questions about her parents and other family members who had all disappeared. This was often the case for an abandoned child growing up in the care system in the 1940s. It was best to focus on the future when you might have some control over events. Fostering experiences can be good - for Anita they were not. This is her story, a story of survival and inspiring courage to overcome the traumas of her abusive childhood. She chose to work with severely disabled children and that developed into her passion for over 40 years, eventually achieving the rewarding role of headteacher of a new school. The memorable stories of those years feature in The Broken Tree, and Anita also goes into detail about her search for her long-lost family members and the impact each made upon her life. This includes the journey of finding her brother, an internationally famous clown and mime artist, known as Potts. His story is still to be told. Tragic at times, her tale is ultimately uplifting and inspirational for all those who struggle in life to overcome the hand they’ve been dealt.

When a brooch is broken, some of its magic is lost... **While this is not a time travel romance, the hero and heroine are taken out of their comfort zones and face many of the same challenges MacKlenna Family time travelers have confronted in previous brooch books.**.

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK Winner of the 2022 BookTube Silver Medal in Fiction * Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction "A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times." -David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love. Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family's troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world. A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak's best work yet.