In "The Summer Book" Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer--its sunlight and storms--into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. "On an island," thinks the grandmother, "everything is complete." In "The Summer Book," Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.
Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in "The Summer Book," and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.
"The Summer Book" is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.

"The Vet's Daughter" combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife's death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own.
Harrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King, "The Vet's Daughter" is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.

In a thin place, according to legend, the membrane separating this world from the spirit world is almost nonexistent. The small New England town of Varennes is such a place, and Kathryn Davis transports us there - revealing a surprising pageant of life as, in the course of one summer, Varennes' tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of a threatening outsider, worldly and otherworldly forces come into play, and a young local girl finds her miraculous gift for resurrecting the dead tested by the conflict between logic and wish.

Two kids growing up in a genteel suburb of Los Angeles, Ralph and his younger sister, Molly, are independent-minded and highly imaginative and more than a little wild. They have no patience with the evasive politeness and mincing words of their mother and older sisters, so they're delighted when they're sent for the summer to the Colorado mountain ranch of their uncle Claude. Initially the children feel liberated by this encounter with nature at its most ruggedly spectacular and demanding. Soon, however, Ralph begins to sense, not without anxiety, the call and challenge of impending manhood, while Molly, for her part, burns both with the ambition of becoming a writer and the fear of being left behind in childhood. Neither suspects that tragedy may be the cost of coming of age.
Elaine Showalter recently wondered whether "The Mountain Lion" wasn't simply the best American novel of the 1940s. Certainly this beautifully written novel about the death of innocence, with its two vulnerable and yet deeply appealing central characters and its gorgeous descriptions of the Rocky Mountains, is as gripping, offbeat, emotionally resonant, and plain heartbreaking today as when it first appeared more than half a century ago.

In the summer of 1964, the Davis family left Japan after 14 years as missionaries there and, in a homemade camper-van, drove from Bombay, India to Southampton, England where they boarded the Queen Elizabeth to New York City. During the trip, Mrs. Davis kept a diary. Now, 50 years later, daughter Irene has added what she remembers of that summer. Travel along as this family encounters new adventures each day... some humorous, some inspiring, and some terrifying

Decades after delivering a baby boy, Joseph, who lived only three minutes, Kathryn Davi-Cardinale began receiving communications from her son, through what the author calls "inner dictation." She began documenting these messages as she received them over the course of many years. Her son urged her to share his words with everyone. In Joseph--My Son, My Guide, the author offers these dictations to readers in their original form. Taken individually and as a whole, Joseph's messages provide moving insights into the meaning of love, inner peace, and forgiveness. They serve also as a roadmap to discovering the purpose of life. This true story about an unusual mother-son relationship can transform the way we look at death and afterlife.

This brilliantly acclaimed novel tells the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history. As Versailles begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé. He will become the sixteenth Louis to rule France, and Antoinette will be his queen-although neither shows a strong inclination toward power, politics, or the roles that they have been summoned to play. Antoinette finds herself hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, and the manifold twists and turns of the palace she calls home. Versailles is an enchanting meditation on time and the soul's true journey within it, at once wittily entertaining and astonishingly wise.