Download or read book City of Tranquil Light written by Bo Caldwell and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What ardent, dazzling souls emerge from these American missionaries in China . . . A beautiful, searing book that leaves an indelible presence in the mind.” —Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted Day Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve the lives of the people of Kuang P’ing Ch’eng—City of Tranquil Light, a place they come to love—and face incredible hardship, will their faith and relationship be enough to sustain them? Told through Will and Katherine’s alternating viewpoints—and inspired by the lives of the author’s maternal grandparents—City of Tranquil Light is a tender and elegiac portrait of a young marriage set against the backdrop of the shifting face of a beautiful but torn nation. A deeply spiritual book, it shows how those who work to teach others often have the most to learn, and is further evidence that Bo Caldwell writes “vividly and with great historical perspective” (San Jose Mercury News). “City of Tranquil Light is just my kind of book. It is full of light, even at its darkest moments. I relished the hours spent with this dedicated and intrepid couple and will not soon forget them. Bo Caldwell has honored her missionary grandparents with her storytelling skills.” —Gail Godwin, New York Times–bestselling author

Download or read book The Distant Land of My Father written by Bo Caldwell and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious man and his adoring daughter are separated and estranged by an ocean and by the tides of history in this “marvelous” novel (Los Angeles Times). For Anna Schoene, growing up in the magical world of Shanghai in the 1930s creates a special bond between her and her father. He is the son of missionaries, a smuggler, and a millionaire who leads a charmed but secretive life. When the family flees to Los Angeles in the face of the Japanese occupation, he chooses to stay, believing his connections and luck will keep him safe. He’s wrong—but he survives, only to again choose Shanghai over his family during the Second World War. Anna and her father reconnect late in his life, when she finally has a family of her own, but it is only when she discovers his extensive journals that she is able to fully understand him and the reasons for his absences. The Distant Land of My Father is a “beautiful” novel “for everyone who has ever felt himself in exile from any beloved place, or a time that can never return” (The Washington Post Book World). “Seamlessly weaves together Anna’s own memories with those of her father, gleaned from the journals . . . An elegant, refined story of families, wartime, and the mystique of memory.” —Kirkus Reviews “Vivid with details of prewar Shanghai and Los Angeles.” —Publishers Weekly “Lush and epic.” —San Jose Mercury News “Remarkable . . . A moving tale of love and the possibility of forgiveness.” —Library Journal

Download or read book Safely Home written by Randy Alcorn and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-07-29 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is this the day I die? Li Quan asks himself this question daily, knowing that he might be killed for practicing his faith. American businessman Ben Fielding has no idea what his brilliant former college roommate is facing in China. He expects his old friend has fulfilled his dream of becoming a university professor. But when they are reunited in China after twenty years, both men are shocked at what they discover about each other. Thrown together in an hour of encroaching darkness, both must make choices that will determine not only the destinies of two men, but two families, two nations, and two worlds.

Download or read book Territory of Light written by Yuko Tsushima and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the most significant contemporary Japanese writers, a haunting, dazzling novel of loss and rebirth “Yuko Tsushima is one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation.” —Foumiko Kometani, The New York Times I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back . . . It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become. At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire, and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time. It won the inaugural Noma Literary Prize.

Download or read book Rising Up Book One in the Tranquility Series written by Tanya Ross and published by Tanya Ross. This book was released on 2021-09-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A city under glass. A girl under pressure. When secrets come out, which one will break first? Sixteen-year-old empath Ember Vinata is devastated by her mother’s mysterious death. But in a disease-free domed metropolis where happiness is electronically monitored and enforced, expressing her grief means exile to The Outside. The only person who can help her is a smoking-hot government agent. When strange prophetic dreams compel her to investigate, and she discovers the source of the fatal illness, Ember is stunned to discover the perfect city in which she lives is nothing like it seems. And when her new boyfriend appears to be torn between seeking justice and remaining loyal to his oaths, she fears there is no one she can trust… …Or would her world be rocked by a criminal from The Outside? Ember’s quest for the truth could set her free – or make her a captive pawn.

Download or read book The Light Between Oceans written by M.L. Stedman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title.

Download or read book Hidden Gardens of Paris written by Susan Cahill and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring 40 parks, squares and woodlands, posh and plain, both in Paris and surrounds, Cahill's illustrated guide will lead you off the beaten track to areas of Paris you might not otherwise encounter.

Download or read book You Are Gods written by David Bentley Hart and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Bentley Hart offers an intense and thorough reflection upon the issue of the supernatural in Christian theology and doctrine. In recent years, the theological—and, more specifically, Roman Catholic—question of the supernatural has made an astonishing return from seeming oblivion. David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods presents a series of meditations on the vexed theological question of the relation of nature and supernature. In its merely controversial aspect, the book is intended most directly as a rejection of a certain Thomistic construal of that relation, as well as an argument in favor of a model of nature and supernature at once more Eastern and patristic, and also more in keeping with the healthier currents of mediaeval and modern Catholic thought. In its more constructive and confessedly radical aspects, the book makes a vigorous case for the all-but-complete eradication of every qualitative, ontological, or logical distinction between the natural and the supernatural in the life of spiritual creatures. It advances a radically monistic vision of Christian metaphysics but does so wholly on the basis of credal orthodoxy. Hart, one of the most widely read theologians in America today, presents a bold gesture of resistance to the recent revival of what used to be called “two-tier Thomism,” especially in the Anglophone theological world. In this astute exercise in classical Christian orthodoxy, Hart takes the metaphysics of participation, high Trinitarianism, Christology, and the soteriological language of theosis to their inevitable logical conclusions. You Are Gods will provoke many readers interested in theological metaphysics. The book also offers a vision of Christian thought that draws on traditions (such as Vedanta) from which Christian philosophers and theologians, biblical scholars, and religious studies scholars still have a great deal to learn.

Download or read book Sea of Tranquility written by Emily St. John Mandel and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads “One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

Download or read book The Mountain of Light written by Indu Sundaresan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally bestselling author of The Twentieth Wife, a novel based on the tumultuous history of a legendary 186-carat diamond—originating in India—and the men and women who possessed it. As empires rose and fell and mighty kings jostled for power, its glittering radiance never dimmed. It is the “Mountain of Light”—the Kohinoor diamond—and its facets reflect a sweeping story of love, adventure, conquest, and betrayal. Its origins are the stuff of myth, but for centuries this spectacular gem changes hands from one ruler to another in India, Persia, and Afghanistan. In 1850, the ancient stone is sent halfway around the world where it will play a pivotal role in the intertwined destinies of a boy-king of India and a young queen of England—a queen who claims the Mountain of Light and India itself for her own burgeoning empire, the most brilliant jewels in her imperial crown. The Mountain of Light is a magnificent story of loss and recovery, sweeping change and enduring truth, wrapped around the glowing heart of one of the world’s most famous diamonds.

Download or read book A Tranquil Star written by Primo Levi and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English publication of 17 classic Primo Levi stories marks the 20thanniversary of his death.

Download or read book The Rings of Saturn written by W. G. Sebald and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The Rings of Saturn—with its curious archive of photographs—records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."

Download or read book The Seamstress written by Allison Pittman and published by NavPress. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully crafted story breathes life into the cameo character from the classic novel A Tale of Two Cities. France, 1788 It is the best of times . . . On a tranquil farm nestled in the French countryside, two orphaned cousins—Renée and Laurette—have been raised under the caring guardianship of young Émile Gagnon, the last of a once-prosperous family. No longer starving girls, Laurette and Renée now spend days tending Gagnon's sheep, and nights in their cozy loft, whispering secrets and dreams in this time of waning innocence and peace. It is the worst of times . . . Paris groans with a restlessness that can no longer be contained within its city streets. Hunger and hatred fuel her people. Violence seeps into the ornate halls of Versailles. Even Gagnon’s table in the quiet village of Mouton Blanc bears witness to the rumbles of rebellion, where Marcel Moreau embodies its voice and heart. It is the story that has never been told. In one night, the best and worst of fate collide. A chance encounter with a fashionable woman will bring Renée’s sewing skills to light and secure a place in the court of Queen Marie Antoinette. An act of reckless passion will throw Laurette into the arms of the increasingly militant Marcel. And Gagnon, steadfast in his faith in God and country, can only watch as those he loves march straight into the heart of the revolution.

Download or read book Drifts written by Kate Zambreno and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work.” —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29 “Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.” —Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29 Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything. A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.

Download or read book The Poisoned City written by Anna Clark and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives. It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that time, twelve people had died and Flint’s children had suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun. In the first full account of this American tragedy, Anna Clark's The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

Download or read book Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots written by Jessica Soffer and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A troubled teen turns to cooking lessons to win her emotionally distant mother’s love in this “moving [and] extraordinary” novel (The Atlantic). Lorca spends her life poring over cookbooks to earn the love of her distracted, angry mother, a prominent Manhattan chef who left Lorca’s father and is now packing her off to boarding school. Desperate to prove herself, Lorca resolves to track down the recipe for her mother’s ideal meal. She signs up for cooking lessons from Victoria, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant profoundly shaken by her husband’s death. Soon these two develop a deeper bond while their concoctions—cardamom pistachio cookies, baklava, and masgouf—bake in Victoria’s kitchen. But their individual endeavors force a reckoning with the past, the future, and the truth—whatever it might be. “Sassy, brash, acrobatic and colorful…I want to read it again and again.” —Time “Impressive…Soffer’s style is natural and assured.”—Meg Wolitzer, All Things Considered, NPR “Breathtaking…a profoundly redemptive story about loss, self-discovery, and acceptance.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Soffer’s prose is as controlled as it is fresh, as incisive as it is musical.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

Download or read book Spirit Walk Special Edition written by Steve Smith and published by William Carey Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Holy Spirit is the Hidden Mover behind all personal life transformation and ministry fruitfulness. Since the original publication of Spirit Walk, author Steve Smith has gone home to meet the Lord face-to-face. However, before that glorious day, he penned an impassioned plea to believers in the last days of his life. That plea and piece of instruction is what comprises the new foreword in this special edition of Spirit Walk. Read and be both challenged and invited to a life lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Though we know the Bible says to walk in the Spirit, the majority of Christians are illiterate (and even nervous) about how to practically live in His power. The result is lives marred by continued brokenness and ministries plagued by fruitlessness. In contrast, believers from Acts understood the ancient path of the Spirit Walk. That extraordinary power was not just for them, but also for us. Gleaning insights from implementation in dozens of Acts-like movements around the world, Spirit Walk “lifts the hood and shows us the real secret behind apostolic, disciple multiplying movements” (Neil Cole, author of Organic Church). Whether you need a movement of God in your personal life or in your ministry, this book takes you through the timeless principles of the Bible. The Spirit Walk path has helped thousands of ordinary people shift from a fundamental reliance upon methods and self-helps to the essential reliance upon the Spirit who empowers both. Discover how to start on your lifelong journey of being filled again and again by the Holy Spirit as you abide in Christ.