Tiger Heart

One magical friendship. One roaring adventure. The magical tale of a bold young chimney sweep and a remarkable tiger, a dangerously hypnotic ruby and a mystical land found across an ocean and through a storm. Perfect for fans of The Girl of Ink and Stars and Pax. Fly never meant to end up in a cage with a man-eating tiger. And though she's sure she's no princess, when the tiger addresses her as 'your majesty', she can't help but vow to free him and return him home. But the bird-filled jungles and cloud-topped mountains of the tiger's homeland are an ocean away. And not everyone wants the tiger - or Fly - to get there alive. With dark and dangerous forces working against them, will Fly be able to fulfil her promise and maybe - just maybe - become the queen her tiger knows her to be?

The call of the wild is powerfully realised in this thrillingly evocative modern day fable A girl raised in the wild, a desperate race for freedom and a boy with a fiercely guarded secret... When Nona's guardian kills himself, she is immediately suspected of murdering him. In a world where nature and darkness are feared, where wild animals are held captive and cities are illuminated by permanent light, who will believe her innocence? Nona must flee with her only friend - a bear who is strangely human. In their desperate attempt to escape capture, Nona and her bear encounter two strange boys, Caius and Jay. Together, the four of them will hide, and fight, and make the deadliest of enemies in their desperate race to a forbidden place called The Edge - where nature is unrestrained, where there is light and shade, forest and mountain, and where there are no shackles or boundaries. A poetic, haunting and unforgettable modern fable about nature, society, and what it is that makes us human.

Paul Dear is a good and clever boy, but he’s special in ways that even his adoring parents could never have imagined. For by day, in London’s Kensington Gardens, he walks and talks with the pixies and sprites and other magical creatures that dwell among the living–but are unseen by most. Then everything changes when tragedy strikes–and a quest begins that will lead Paul to a curio shop where a magical ally awaits him and launches him into the starry skies, bound for a realm where anything is possible. Far from home, Paul will run with fierce Indian warriors, cross swords with fearsome pirates, befriend a magnificent white tiger, and soar beside an extraordinary, ageless boy who reigns in a boundless world of imagination.

Katrell Christie was a thirty-something former art student turned roller-derby rebel who opened a tea shop in Atlanta. Barely two years later, her life would make a drastic change and so would the lives of a group of girls half a world away. I chose the name of my tea shop—Dr. Bombay's Underwater Tea Party—because it sounded whimsical. India wasn't a part of the equation. Not even remotely. I didn't do yoga. I had no deep yearning to see the Taj Mahal or tour Hindu temples. I was not harboring some spiritual desire to follow the path of the Buddha. Indian food? I could take it or leave it. But a regular customer, Cate, described a trip she'd taken there as a Rotary Club scholar. She was planning to go again to work with a women's handicraft exchange. Her enthusiasm was infectious. "You should come," she said after breezing into the shop one day. I didn't give it much thought. I figured she wanted me, the former rollergirl, there as the muscle. I was a new business owner with work stretching for as far as I could see . . . But Katrell did go. She toured the tea fields of Darjeeling, witnessed the Hindu throngs at the Ganges, and helped string pearls in religiously conservative Hyderabad where Cate was working to help market jewelry. As we work, I watch. Some women shed their coverings when they enter the workroom but others remain fully covered, only a glimpse of eyes visible. It's disconcerting. I'm a Southern girl. My mother taught me to throw out a big friendly smile to the world. But with these women—their faces cloaked—I get nothing back. I can't connect. Even worse, I can't get my mind off the idea that no matter what these women do, they will never get off this path. I had never wrapped my brain around that until I sit here, hour after hour, stringing pearls. Pearls that would be worn by some other woman, on a bare and lovely neck, with a dazzling smile and a bright future stretching out before her. I'm pretty sure that this is the most depressed I've ever been in my life. Katrell had no idea at the time, but she would find a new purpose in India, and in the most unlikely way, her life would be eternally entwined with women from a whole new world. While in Darjeeling, Katrell met some girls at an orphanage who would very soon "age out" without any place to go. Their immediate futures were grim: sex trafficking, prostitution, or begging on the streets. Returning home, Katrell just couldn't forget the girls she left behind in Darjeeling, and before long, "The Learning Tea" was born. Today, The Learning Tea has provided life necessities for eleven young women—a safe home, education, uniforms, medical care, as well as music lessons, tutoring, computer classes, and other extracurricular activities. Another center may be on the horizon in Chennai. All because one unlikely hero with a little tea shop in Atlanta, Georgia, stepped forward and said, "I'll go."

Walter Anton loves his wife, but only tolerates his job as a cost accountant at Blatchford Steel Services in Pittsburgh. Thrown into a sticky business situation that threatens his company’s survival, he takes on a sense of mission and finds strengths he didn’t know he had. He rubs shoulders with the powerful in the city, while butting heads with others, as he digs into a devious plot involving the EPA, a congressman, and fellow employees. As a result, Walter’s life is threatened and two others die at the hands of a hired killer. At the same time, his wife takes on a mission of her own to both help her husband succeed in business and she tries to get pregnant. Tiger Heart: A Business Love Story offers both suspense and humor in an unforgettable way.

This remarkable true story of a Chinese peasant girl’s unlikely rise to success is “like a suspense novel . . . Impossible to put down”(Library Journal, starred review). Aisling Juanjuan Shen was born to illiterate peasants in a tiny farming hamlet in China’s Yangtze Delta in 1974. Pronounced useless by her parents because she wasn’t good at planting rice, she became the first person from her village ever to attend college. After graduating with a teaching degree, the government assigned her to a remote and low-paying job that she was expected to hold for the rest of her life. But she wasn’t satisfied—and she bought her way out of her secure position and left for the special economic zones of southern China, in search of happiness and success in the business world, eventually immigrating to the United States. In this memoir, Aisling chronicles her rise from rural poverty to a successful career, illustrating the massive economic and social changes that have taken place in China over the past several decades. Her story is emblematic of a new generation of Chinese women who are leaving the rice paddies and government jobs in order to enter the free market and determine the course of their own lives.

San Francisco based Investigative reporter Jake Fleming has a problem: Desmond Lewis, a Professor of English Literature and an old friend of his from London has vanished, en-route to a talk at the University of California in Berkeley about a new book promising shocking revelations. He never arrives. When a rented car is found parked on the Golden Gate Bridge with Lewis’s travel bag in the trunk, the police deem it a suicide. Jake doesn’t believe that for a minute, and convinces his newspaper, The San Francisco Tribune, to sponsor a trip to London to investigate. When Jake arrives, he discovers Lewis’s office and apartment have both been ransacked. Any evidence of a new book is gone: no manuscripts, no flash drives, nothing. The only remaining clue is a list of brief words or abbreviations. Their meaning escapes him, but it’s all he has.