The Off Season

500 Signed and Numbered Hardcover

Murdock's stunning debut novel, narrated by 15-year-old D.J. Schwenk of Red Bend, Wisconsin, is now available in paperback.

A Junior Library Guild selection.

A visceral story that you can see, taste, and feel. How could this happen? The question of 2016 becomes deeply personal in James Sturm’s riveting graphic novel Off Season, which charts one couple’s divisive separation during Bernie Sanders’s loss to Hillary Clinton, Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, and the disorienting months that followed. We see a father navigating life as a single parent and coping with the disintegration of a life-defining relationship. Amid the upheaval lie tender moments with his kids—a sleeping child being carried in from the car, Christmas-morning anticipation, a late-night cookie after a temper tantrum—and fallible humans drenched in palpable feelings of grief, rage, loss, and overwhelming love. Using anthropomorphized characters as a tactic for tempering an otherwise emotionally fraught situation, Off Season is unaffected and raw, steeped in the specificity of its time while speaking to a larger cultural moment. A truly human experience, Off Season displays Sturm’s masterful pacing and storytelling combined with conscious and confident growth as the celebrated cartoonist and educator moves away from historical fiction to deliver this long-form narrative set in contemporary times. Originally serialized on Slate, this expanded edition turns timely vignettes into a timeless, deeply affecting account of one family and their off season.

The poems in The Off-Season are populated with things--'90s TV shows, mixtapes, crosstown buses, winter beaches--signifiers that trace a trajectory from girlhood to adulthood and bring to the surface feelings and desires that ordinarily stay hidden. We witness the strangeness of modern life, relive our own adolescent awkwardness and listen in on conversations with dead poets, TV characters, family members and intimates. With humor, fierceness and generosity, The Off-Season grapples with the question of how to be in the world.

Escape to the Chesapeake Bay, where beach life is full of love, surprises and second chances… When an injury forces K-9 officer Trey Harrison onto the sidelines, his only thought is getting back to the police force where he belongs. And he’ll do anything to make that happen—even volunteer in a small waterfront community, just to please his boss. But no one ever said Trey had to enjoy it… Since the surgery that destroyed her dreams of having children, schoolteacher Erica Rowe has grown even more dedicated to her work with at-risk teens. So she doesn't need some cop with a chip on his shoulder putting the program's future in jeopardy. But when Trey finally connects with the students, Erica's heart melts. And when, in a tender moment, he admits he longs to have children, her heart breaks. She's convinced he'd be better off with someone who can give him everything, but she can't seem to shake the hope that maybe love is enough… Don’t miss Forever on the Bay, the next book in The Off Season series by Lee Tobin McClain, where safe harbor and new beginnings await on the Chesapeake Bay. The Off Season Series Book 1 - Cottage at the Beach Book 2 - Reunion at the Shore Book 3 - Christmas on the Coast Book 4 - Home to the Harbor Book 5 - First Kiss at Christmas Book 6 - Forever on the Bay

Basketball-loving Nick and his friend Kia visit Nick's cousin Ned in a remote national park in the mountains of British Columbia during a very dry summer when the danger of fires is everywhere.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "One doesn't read Anne Rivers Siddons's books. One dwells in them." - Chicago Tribune For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly--happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love over and over again, where their ghosts still dance. There, she looks hard to her past--to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety-- to try to figure out her future. It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage.