Traveling Mercies

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Bird by Bird comes a personal, wise, very funny, and “life-affirming” book (People) that shows us how to find meaning and hope through shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life. "Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." —San Francisco Chronicle Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She has a friend whose morning prayer each day is "Whatever," and whose evening prayer is "Oh, well." Anne thinks of Jesus as "Casper the friendly savior" and describes God as "one crafty mother." Despite—or because of—her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. Since Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her fans have been waiting for her to write the book that explained how she came to the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alluded to in her two earlier nonfiction books. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers—her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. And Traveling Mercies is a welcome return to those lives, as well as an introduction to new companions Lamott treats with the same candor, insight, and tenderness. Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers."

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Bird by Bird comes a personal, wise, very funny, and “life-affirming” book (People) that shows us how to find meaning and hope through shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life. "Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." —San Francisco Chronicle Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She has a friend whose morning prayer each day is "Whatever," and whose evening prayer is "Oh, well." Anne thinks of Jesus as "Casper the friendly savior" and describes God as "one crafty mother." Despite—or because of—her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. Since Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her fans have been waiting for her to write the book that explained how she came to the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alluded to in her two earlier nonfiction books. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers—her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. And Traveling Mercies is a welcome return to those lives, as well as an introduction to new companions Lamott treats with the same candor, insight, and tenderness. Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers."

Combining elements of spiritual study and memoir, the author describes her odyssey of faith, drawing on her own sometimes troubled past to explore the many ways in which faith sustains and guides one's daily life.

“Anne Lamott is the two-way mirror of our hopes, insecurities, and cheating hearts, an astute observer of human nature.” —Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club The celebrated author of Bird by Bird offers a stunningly evocative novel about a divorcée who returns to her small Northern California town, where she encounters vivid memories of her eccentric family and coming-of-age in the 1960s With generosity, humor, and pathos, Anne Lamott takes on the barrage of dislocating changes that shook the Sixties. Leading us through the wake of these changes is Nanny Goodman, a girl living in Marin County, California. A half–adult child among often childish adults, Nanny grows up with two spectacularly odd parents: a writer father and a mother who is a constant source of material. As she moves into her adolescence, so, it seems, does America. While grappling with her own coming–of–age, Nanny witnesses an entire culture’s descent into drugs, the mass exodus of fathers from her town, and rapid real estate and technological development that foreshadow a drastically different future. In All New People, Anne Lamott works a special magic, transforming failure into forgiveness and illuminating the power of love to redeem us.

“Anne Lamott is my Oprah.” —Chicago Tribune The New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night, Dawn, Almost Everything and Bird by Bird, a powerful exploration of mercy and how we can embrace it. "Mercy is radical kindness," Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It's the permission you give others—and yourself—to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult. In Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by "facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves." It's up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere—"within us and outside us, all around us"—and to use it to forge a deeper understanding of ourselves and more honest connections with each other. While that can be difficult to do, Lamott argues that it's crucial, as "kindness towards others, beginning with myself, buys us a shot at a warm and generous heart, the greatest prize of all." Full of Lamott’s trademark honesty, humor and forthrightness, Hallelujah Anyway is profound and caring, funny and wise—a hopeful book of hands-on spirituality.

Now in paperback, from the New York Times best-selling author of Sacred Contracts and Anatomy of the Spirit, a timely guide with 100 prayers for entering into a personal relationship with the Divine. "I've loved so many of Caroline Myss's books, but maybe none so much as Intimate Conversations with the Divine. Has there ever been a more urgent need for her unique and profound (and sometimes wonderfully cranky) take on our spiritual reality, healing, and the language of holiness?" -- Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies and Help, Thanks, Wow In her most personal book to date--now available in paperback for the first time--beloved teacher and best-selling author Caroline Myss draws on her own practice to help us regain our fluency in the language of prayer and renew our connection to the sacred. Intimate Conversations with the Divine offers 100 of Myss's personal prayers as a resource and inspiration to start a prayer practice of your own. Each prayer illustrates a different type of grace that feeds the human soul, from awakening, endurance, and healing, to silence, surrender, and trust. "We are one holy system of life and great cosmic truth, which is that all life--including all of us--breathes together," Myss writes. "I hope this book, these prayers, will bring you comfort and grace, and help you through the difficult times ahead. And I hope they will inspire you to believe that with God, all things are possible."

A New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night Dawn, Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Almost Everything. Author Anne Lamott writes about the three simple prayers essential to coming through tough times, difficult days and the hardships of daily life. Readers of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott’s funny and perceptive writing about her own faith through decades of trial and error. And in her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she knows about prayer to these fundamentals. It is these three prayers – asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us – that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they mean to her and how they have helped, and explores how others have embraced these same ideas. Insightful and honest as only Anne Lamott can be, Help, Thanks, Wow is the everyday faith book that new Lamott readers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure.

The women in an Arctic village must survive a sinister threat after all the men are wiped out by a catastrophic storm in this "gripping novel inspired by a real-life witch hunt. . . . Beautiful and chilling" (Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe). When the women take over, is it sorcery or power? Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the skies break into a sudden and reckless storm. All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster. For the women left behind, survival means defying the strict rules of the island. They fish, hunt, and butcher reindeer—which they never did while the men were alive. But the foundation of this new feminine frontier begins to crack with the arrival of Absalom Cornet, a man sent from Scotland to root out alleged witchcraft. Cornet brings with him the threat of danger—and a pretty, young Norwegian wife named Ursa. As Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them, with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence. "The Mercies has a pull as sure as the tide. It totally swept me away to Vardø, where grief struck islanders stand tall in the shadow of religious persecution and witch burnings. It's a beautifully intimate story of friendship, love and hope. A haunting ode to self-reliant and quietly defiant women." (Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize winning author of Shuggie Bain)