So Far Away: A Daughter’s Memoir of Life, Loss, and Love

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press (November 15, 2011)

Christine Hartmann’s mother valued control above all else, yet one event appeared beyond her command: the timing of her own death.  Not to be denied there either, two decades in advance Irmgard Hartmann chose the date on which to end her life.  And her next step was to tell her daughter all about it.  For twenty years, Irmgard maintained an unwavering goal, to commit suicide at age seventy.  She managed her chronic hypertension, stayed healthy and active, and lived life to the fullest.  Meanwhile, Christine fought desperately against the decision.  When Irmgard wouldn’t listen, the only way to remain part of her life was for Christine to swallow her mother’s plans–hook, line, and sinker.

Christine’s father, as it turned out, prepared too slowly for old age.  Before he had made any decision, fate disabled him through a series of strokes.  Confined to a nursing home, severely impaired by dementia and frustrated by his circumstances, his life epitomized the predicament her mother wanted to avoid.

So Far Away gives us an intimate view of a person interacting with and reacting to her parents at the end of their lives.  In a richly detailed, poignant story of family members’ separate yet interwoven journeys, it underscores the complexities and opportunities that life presents each one of us.

“Grief is an individual process and dependent on situations, personalities, and relationships, but Hartmann offers personal discoveries that feel universal. Many readers will find familiar themes and emotions. Her book is a gift.”– ForeWord Book Reviews (read the full review HERE)

About Christine W. Hartmann

Christine W. Hartmann is a researcher in the Veterans Health Administration and an assistant professor at Boston University.  She received her PhD at the Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research.  She has published numerous articles on healthcare quality improvement, focusing particularly on long-term care.  To learn more about Ms. Hartmann and her work, please visit her website at www.chartmannbooks.com.

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Christine W. Hartmann’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, November 21st:  Peeking Between the Pages

Wednesday, November 23rd:  I Am A Reader, Not A Writer - author Q&A

Thursday, November 24th:  Life in Review

Monday, November 28th:  Boarding in My Forties

Tuesday, November 29th:  Book Hounds

Thursday, December 1st:  Acting Balanced

Monday, December 5th:  The Lost Entwife

Tuesday, December 6th:  Colloquium

Wednesday, December 7th:  Patricia’s Wisdom

Monday, December 12th:  Book Dilettante

Tuesday, December 13th:  Luxury Reading

Wednesday, December 14th:  She Treads Softly

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin (November 8, 2011)

After moving from the Midwest to New York City at the age of twenty-one, Robert Rave finally found the resolve to mail a letter to his parents informing them that he was gay.  Once Robert was “out,” both he and his mother Jane felt a newfound freedom to be more honest with each other.  From the discrimination Jane experienced as a pregnant teenager in a small town, to Robert’s “manscaping,” almost no topic was off-limits in their conversations.  Soon, Robert was creating a “gay glossary” so that Jane could understand the lexicon and Jane was giving Robert the same dating advice that she used to give Robert’s older sister (“men are jerks”).

Conversations and Cosmopolitans is a frank, funny, and heartfelt look at coming out from both a mother’s and son’s perspective, and an inspiring memoir about building family relationships based on honesty, openness, and acceptance.

“As a mother of boys I hope one of them is gay so I can have this much fun with him.” –Heather McDonald, writer and story producer for Chelsea Lately and the New York Times bestselling author of You’ll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again

“The most endearing, inventive memoir I’ve read in ages…[It] is a necessary book, a book we’ve all been waiting for, as it deals honestly, affectionately, and originally with an experience that’s central to our contemporary lives–the struggle to know and love your parents and children exactly as they are.” –Robert Leleux, author of The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy

“[A] heartfelt look at a mother and son’s relationship from both points of view. [L]augh-out-loud funny, touching and poignant…”–Lance Bass, Grammy-nominated singer, former member of *NSYNC, and author of Out of Sync

“Totally delightful…The main character is really Manhattan. And as Robert struggles to get a life in Gay New York, Jane coaches him through the rough patches with her no-nonsense maternal charm.”—Mishna Wolff, author of I’m Down

About Jane and Robert Rave

JANE RAVE grew up in a small Midwest town, doing all the things you do in a small town: cheerleading, band, and church activities.  She is the mother of three, grandmother of six, and has been married for forty-four years.  She lives in Illinois.

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ROBERT RAVE is the author of two novels, Spin and Waxed, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Visit him at facebook.com/robertraveauthor or follow him on Twitter @RobertRave.

TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS for CONVERSATIONS AND COSMOPOLITANS:

Monday, November 7th:  Book Club Classics!

Tuesday, November 8th:  Bibrary Book Lust – author guest post

Wednesday, November 9th:  DBC Reads

Thursday, November 10th:  DBC Reads – author Q&A

Friday, November 11th:  Chick Lit Reviews

Monday, November 14th:  Colloquium

Wednesday, November 16th:  The Betty and Boo Chronicles

Monday, November 21st:  Life in Review

Tuesday, November 22nd:  Chick Lit is Not Dead 

Tuesday, November 22nd:  Regular Rumination

Monday, November 28th:  Book Hooked Blog

Wednesday, November 30th:  Lit and Life

Thursday, December 1st:  Sara’s Organized Chaos

Tuesday, December 6th:  Luxury Reading

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books (October 11, 2011)

For Donia Bijan’s family, food has been the language they use to tell their stories and to communicate their love. In 1978, when the Islamic revolution in Iran threatened their safety, they fled to California’s Bay Area, where the familiar flavors of Bijan’s mother’s cooking formed a bridge to the life they left behind. Now, through the prism of food, award-winning chef Donia Bijan unwinds her own story, finding that at the heart of it all is her mother, whose love and support enabled Bijan to realize her dreams.

From the Persian world of her youth to the American life she embraced as a teenager to her years at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris (studying under the infamous Madame Brassart) to apprenticeships in France’s three-star kitchens and finally back to San Francisco, where she opened her own celebrated bistro, Bijan evokes a vibrant kaleidoscope of cultures and cuisines. And she shares thirty inspired recipes from her childhood (Saffron Yogurt Rice with Chicken and Eggplant and Orange Cardamom Cookies), her French training (Ratatouille with Black Olives and Fried Bread and Purple Plum Skillet Tart), and her cooking career (Roast Duck Legs with Dates and Warm Lentil Salad and Rose Petal Ice Cream).

An exhilarating, heartfelt memoir, Maman’s Homesick Pie is also a reminder of the women who encourage us to shine.

“A memoir both universal and intimate, anchored in history and lifted by the mysterious elements that only occur in a warm and inviting kitchen.” –Marsha Mehran, author of Pomegranate Soup

“I can feel the big heart in this story, the delicious recipes and the story of an amazing woman whom we all wish we had known.”  –Firoozeh Dumas, author of Funny in Farsi

About Donia Bijan

Donia Bijan graduated from UC Berkeley and Le Cordon Bleu. After presiding over many of San Francisco’s acclaimed restaurants and earning awards for her French-inspired cuisine, in 1994 she opened her own restaurant, L’amie Donia, in Palo Alto. She now divides her days between raising her son, teaching, and writing.

Connect with Donia at her website, doniabijan.com.

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Donia Bijan’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, October 10th:  Books, Movies, and Chinese Food

Friday, October 14th:  Chick Lit Reviews

Monday, October 17th:  girlichef

Wednesday, October 19th:  Melody & Words

Thursday, October 20th:  Unabridged Chick

Monday, October 24th:  Luxury Reading

Monday, October 24th:  Unabridged Chick – author interview

Wednesday, October 26th:  Chocolate and Croissants

Thursday, October 27th:  Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity

Friday, October 28th:  Peeking Between the Pages

Monday, October 31st:  2 Kids and Tired Book Reviews

Tuesday, November 1st:  A Bookish Libraria

Thursday, November 3rd:  Mockingbird Hill Cottage

July Book Club of the Month Contest!

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Immigrant life, father/son relationships, and the evolution of an unlikely writer

Book Clubs will find all that and so much more to discuss in Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos!

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos has won multiple awards for his novels that feature locales as exotic as beautiful Havana and subjects as universal as family, dreams, love, and music.  For his latest project, he writes from the heart about the people and places that have inspired his internationally bestselling novels.  Thoughts Without Cigarettes will detail those developmental years of his life, immigrant life in New York in the 50s and 60s, his relationship with his father, an eye-opening return visit to Cuba later in life, influential time spent in Europe, and much more.  A comprehensive look at the development of an unlikely writer, Thoughts Without Cigarettes will offer a guide through Hijuelos’s innermost thoughts and experiences.

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Mother/Daughter relationships, growing up, letting go

Book Clubs will find much to laugh about and talk over in The Gap Year by Sarah Bird!

From the widely praised author of The Yokota Officers Club and The Flamenco Academy, a novel as hilarious as it is heartbreaking about a single mom and her seventeen-year-old daughter learning how to let go in that precarious moment before college empties the nest. 

In The Gap Year, told with perfect pitch from both points of view, we meet Cam Lightsey, lactation consultant extraordinaire, a divorcée still secretly carrying a torch for the ex who dumped her, a suburban misfit who’s given up her rebel dreams so her only child can get a good education.

We also learn the secrets of Aubrey Lightsey, tired of being the dutiful, grade-grubbing band geek, ready to explode from wanting her “real” life to begin, trying to figure out love with boys weaned on Internet porn.

When Aubrey meets Tyler Moldenhauer, football idol–sex god with a dangerous past, the fuse is lit. Late-bloomer Aubrey metastasizes into Cam’s worst silent, sullen teen nightmare, a girl with zero interest in college. Worse, on the sly Aubrey’s in touch with her father, who left when she was two to join a celebrity-ridden nutball cult.

As the novel unfolds—with humor, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and penetrating insights about love in the twenty-first century—the dreams of daughter, mother, and father chart an inevitable, but perhaps not fatal, collision . . .

Discussion questions for The Gap Year can be found HERE.

The Gap Year is featured in Good Housekeeping’s Summer Beach Reads 2011 and  Yahoo’s 10 Best Books for Summer!

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Finding adventure and love, independence and stability, having it all in midlife

Book Clubs will enjoy discussing the many universal issues in All Over the Map by Laura Fraser!

In All Over the Map, the bestselling author of An Italian Affair buys us the plane tickets and takes us in search of adventure and romance as she wonders whether it’s possible, in midlife, to have it all.

Laura loves being a writer who travels all over the map. She can pick up and go whenever she wants, jumping on a plane to escape a romance gone bad or to taste the world’s best ceviche.

When the sexy Parisian professor who helped Laura get over her divorce tells her that he has a new girlfriend, Laura wonders whether her passion for travel is interfering with what most women seem to want at her age: a husband, a family, and a safe, settled life. She’s further shaken by a trip to the South Pacific that goes very wrong, and for a while she becomes a travel writer afraid to travel.

Searching for love and coping with her ordeal, Laura tangos in Buenos Aires, seeks wisdom from an Amazonian shaman, heads off into the wilderness on Outward Bound, goes on a ten-day meditation retreat, interviews sex-trafficked women in Italy, and reports on the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda. When she’s dumped on her forty-fifth birthday, she’s oddly relieved, and realizes she isn’t going to wait for a man anymore. She decides that although she doesn’t have the life she anticipated, she’ll create the life she wants–at home in San Francisco, and in a small arts town in Mexico. Laura experiences the extremes of adventure and emotion that women of all ages will relate to — and she comes out satisfied and happy on the other side.

Discussion questions for All Over the Map from O, the Oprah Magazine can be found HERE.

Laura is happy to talk with book clubs via Skype or phone; email info@laurafraser.com.

All Over the Map was named National Geographic Traveler’s Book of the Month, and one of O, the Oprah Magazine’s Ten Books to Read Now.

““All Over The Map makes you want to pack your bags, explore the world, mend your broken heart, and totally reclaim your life.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed

“Brave, honest, and compulsively readable. I truly laughed and cried.”
— Mary Roach, author of Stiff, Spook, and Bonk

Join Laura for her Mexican Writing Fiesta in San Miguel de Allende, Oct 23-29: http://www.laurafraser.com/writing-from-experience-in-san-miguel-de-allende/.

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Forgiveness, redemption, freedom, and the price we pay to get there

Book Clubs won’t be able to stop talking about A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano!

Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O’Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.

Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies’ organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancé, Melvin Whiteson. Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good hard look at the choices he has made. Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.

Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by. Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home. As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to be truly alive, and she seizes it with both hands.

Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses through life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery’s observation that “the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

Please fill out our super-short registration form and register to win a set of up to ten copies of Thoughts Without Cigarettes by Oscar Hijuelos, The Gap Year by Sarah Bird, All Over the Map by Laura Fraser, or A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano by July 31st!  We will randomly choose winners at the end of the month.  This contest is open to clubs in the US and Canada only (our apologies to friends in other countries).

Best of luck!

We LOVE Book Clubs!

Holy Ghost Girl: A Memoir

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Gotham (October 13, 2011)

Donna Johnson’s remarkable story of being raised under the biggest gospel tent in the world, by David Terrell, one of the most famous evangelical ministers of the 1960s and 70s. Holy Ghost Girl is a compassionate, humorous exploration of faith, betrayal, and coming of age on the sawdust trail.

She was just three years old when her mother signed on as the organist of tent revivalist David Terrell, and before long, Donna Johnson was part of the hugely popular evangelical preacher’s inner circle. At seventeen, she left the ministry for good, with a trove of stranger- than-fiction memories. A homecoming like no other, Holy Ghost Girl brings to life miracles, exorcisms, and faceoffs with the Ku Klux Klan. And that’s just what went on under the tent.

As Terrell became known worldwide during the 1960s and ’70s, the caravan of broken-down cars and trucks that made up his ministry evolved into fleets of Mercedes and airplanes. The glories of the Word mixed with betrayals of the flesh and Donna’s mother bore Terrell’s children in one of the several secret households he maintained. Thousands of followers, dubbed “Terrellites” by the press, left their homes to await the end of the world in cultlike communities. Jesus didn’t show, but the IRS did, and the prophet/healer went to prison.

Recounted with deadpan observations and surreal detail, Holy Ghost Girl bypasses easy judgment to articulate a rich world in which the mystery of faith and human frailty share a surprising and humorous coexistence.

About Donna M. Johnson

Donna M. Johnson has written about religion for The Dallas Morning News and other publications. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, the poet and author Kirk Wilson.

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Donna M. Johnson’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Tuesday, October 4th:  Joyfully Retired

Wednesday, October 5th:  Melody & Words

Thursday, October 6th:  Bermuda Onion

Monday, October 10th:  Chaotic Compendiums

Thursday, October 13th:  In the Next Room

Friday, October 14th:  Books, Movies, and Chinese Food

Friday, October 14th:  Colloquium

Monday, October 17th:  Raging Bibliomania

Tuesday, October 18th:  Amused by Books

Wednesday, October 19th:  Book Addiction

Monday, October 24th:  BookNAround

Tuesday, October 25th:  Life in Review

Wednesday, October 26th:  Sara’s Organized Chaos

Thursday, October 27th:  Broken Teepee

Thursday, October 27th:  Books Like Breathing

Monday, January 9th: A Fair Substitute for Heaven

Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents

Paperback: 304 pages

Publisher: Seal Press (June 7, 2011)

Spanning 15 years of travel, beginning when she is a sophomore in college, Wanderlust documents Elisabeth Eaves’s insatiable hunger for the rush of the unfamiliar and the experience of encountering new people and cultures. Young and independent, she crisscrosses five continents and chases the exotic, both in culture and in romance. In the jungles of Papua New Guinea, she loses herself—literally—to an Australian tour guide; in Cairo, she reconnects with her high school sweetheart, only to discover the beginning of a pattern that will characterize her life over the long-term: while long-distance relationships work well for her, traditional relationships do not.

Wanderlust, however, is more than a chronological conquest of men and countries: at its core, it’s a journey of self-discovery. In the course of her travels, Eaves finds herself and the sense of home she’s been lacking since childhood—and she sheds light on a growing culture of young women who have the freedom and inclination to define their own, increasingly global, lifestyles, unfettered by traditional roles and conventions of past generations of women.

“Once Wanderlust embarks, there’ll be no place else you’d rather be. “–James Wolcott, cultural critic, Vanity Fair

“Elisabeth Eaves is fearless! She’s a warrior-writer of love and travel, encountering with equal courage inclement weather and inappropriate, (though fantastic) men. She’s a twenty-first century Colette, a post-modern Madame de Stael.”  —Rachel Shteir, author of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting

“Wanderlust delivers the goods up front—motorcycles and sex and stories of places that smell nothing like your cafeteria—and then pulls off something trickier. Elisabeth Eaves shows here that our attempts to find a different better self through travel can be immensely entertaining, but we are always already moving. Wanderlust brilliantly, carefully maps how active the heart is, even at a standstill. “—Sasha Frere-Jones, music critic, The New Yorker

About Elisabeth Eaves

Elisabeth Eaves is the author of Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping, and her travel essays have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Adventures from Around the World. Her writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including Forbes, Harper’s, the New York Times, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal, on subjects ranging from lobbyists to lap dancing (but not in the same story). Eaves received a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University and has lived all over the world. Born and raised in Vancouver, she lives in New York City.

Connect with Elisabeth on her website, elisabetheaves.com, on Tumblr, and on Twitter.

Elisabeth Eaves TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, June 13th:  English Major’s Junk Food

Tuesday, June 14th:  Confessions of a Book Addict

Friday, June 17th: Amused by Books

Monday, June 20th:  Melody & Words

Wednesday, June 22nd:  Books Distilled

Thursday, June 23rd:  Life in Review

Monday, June 27th:  Nomad Reader

Wednesday, June 29th:  Regular Rumination

Thursday, June 30th:  Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog

Thursday, July 7th:  The Girl from the Ghetto

Tuesday, July 12th:  Books Are My Boyfriends

Thursday, July 14th:  Joyfully Retired

Thursday, July 21st:  Chaotic Compendiums

Hardcover: 288 pages

Publisher: Gotham (August 4, 2011)

A journalist faces his toughest assignment yet: profiling himself. Zeman recounts his struggle with clinical depression in this high- octane, brutally funny memoir about mood disorders, memory, shock treatment therapy and the quest to get back to normal.

Thirty-five million Americans suffer from clinical depression. But Ned Zeman never thought he’d be one of them. He came from a happy Midwestern family. He had great friends and a busy social life. His career was thriving at Vanity Fair where he profiled adventurers and eccentrics who pushed the limits and died young.  Then, at age thirty-two, anxiety and depression gripped Zeman with increasing violence and consequences. He experimented with therapist after therapist, medication after medication, hospital after hospital- including McLean Hospital, the facility famed for its treatment of writers, from Sylvia Plath to Susanna Kaysen to David Foster Wallace. Zeman eventually went further, by trying electroconvulsive therapy, aka shock treatment, aka “the treatment of last resort.” By the time it was over, Zeman had lost nearly two years’ worth of memory. He was a reporter with amnesia. He had no choice but to start from scratch, to reassemble the pieces of a life he didn’t remember and, increasingly, didn’t want to. His girlfriend was gone; friends weren’t speaking to him. His life lay in ruins. And the biggest question remained, “What the hell did I do?” ??By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, profane and hopeful, The Rules of the Tunnel is a blistering account of Zeman’s twisted ride to hell and back-a return made possible by friends real and less so, among them the dead “eccentrics” he once profiled. It’s a guttural shout of a book, one that defies conventional notions about those with mood disorders, unlocks mysteries within mysteries, and proves that sometimes everything you’re looking for is right in front of you.

About Ned Zeman

Ned Zeman is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he has covered a wide range of subjects: crime, politics, Hollywood, and outdoor adventure. He has also written for Newsweek, Spy, GQ, Outside, and Sports Illustrated. Two of his articles have been finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he cowrote the screenplay for Sugarland, the forthcoming film starring Jodie Foster. He lives in Los Angeles.

Ned Zeman’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, August 1st:  Rundpinne

Tuesday, August 2nd:  The Broke and the Bookish

Wednesday, August 3rd:  Sara’s Organized Chaos

Thursday, August 4th:  Chaotic Compendiums

Monday, August 8th:  Acting Balanced

Tuesday, August 9th:  Book Dilettante

Wednesday, August 10th:  BookNAround

Thursday, August 11th:  In the Next Room

Monday, August 15th:  A Bookworm’s World

Wednesday, August 17th:  Take Me Away

Thursday, August 18th:  Bookshipper

Monday, August 22nd:  Luxury Reading

Monday, August 29th:  Life in Review

Tuesday, August 30th:  Raging Bibliomania

Wednesday, August 31st:  My Book Retreat

Tuesday, September 6th:  Melody & Words

Hardcover: 400 pages

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (May 17, 2011)

First introduced to the world in her sons’ now-classic memoirs—Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors and John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye—Margaret Robison now tells her own haunting and lyrical story. A poet and teacher by profession, Robison describes her Southern Gothic childhood, her marriage to a handsome, brilliant man who became a split-personality alcoholic and abusive husband, the challenges she faced raising two children while having psychotic breakdowns of her own, and her struggle to regain her sanity.

Robison grew up in southern Georgia, where the façade of 1950s propriety masked all sorts of demons, including alcoholism, misogyny, repressed homosexuality, and suicide. She met her husband, John Robison, in college, and together they moved up north, where John embarked upon a successful academic career and Margaret brought up the children and worked on her art and poetry. Yet her husband’s alcoholism and her collapse into psychosis, and the eventual disintegration of their marriage, took a tremendous toll on their family: Her older son, John Elder, moved out of the house when he was a teenager, and her younger son, Chris (who later renamed himself Augusten), never completed high school. When Margaret met Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, the therapist who was treating her husband, she felt understood for the first time and quickly fell under his idiosyncratic and, eventually, harmful influence.

Robison writes movingly and honestly about her mental illness, her shortcomings as a parent, her difficult marriage, her traumatic relationship with Dr. Turcotte, and her two now-famous children, Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, who have each written bestselling memoirs about their family. She also writes inspiringly about her hard-earned journey to sanity and clarity. An astonishing and enduring story, The Long Journey Home is a remarkable and ultimately uplifting account of a complicated, afflicted twentieth-century family.

“Margaret Robison has written, with a simple beauty and elegance that belie a powerful and unflinching honesty, about surviving mental illness, abuse, and the constrictions of womanhood in an era when all three were sorely misunderstood. A striking memoir.”—Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, author of Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression

“After decades of feeling silenced, like so many women of the 1950s, Margaret Robison reclaims her own story. The Long Journey Home is a moving testament to the power of language in confronting the frightening, inchoate experience of madness. But it is also a wistful, richly textured evocation of rural Southern life amidst a cascade of characters both distressing and unforgettable. Robison’s fortitude, candor, and lack of rancor offer a refreshing alternative to many memoirs.”—Gail A. Hornstein, author of Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meaning of Madness

“This is a haunting book, laced with desperation and urgency. The author’s sorely tested faith in the power of writing to heal the soul is an inspiration to any writer. And for memoirists such as myself, she raises the large question of who has the right to tell our stories. For fans of Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors, the mother’s account of her life is an invitation to enter the labyrinthine world of Rashomon.”—Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and The Cloister Walk

About Margaret Robison

Margaret Robison is an artist and the author of four books of poetry. She lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

Learn more about Margaret at her website, www.margaretrobison.com.

Margaret Robison’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Wednesday, June 1st:  Well Read Wife

Wednesday, June 1st:  The Girl from the Ghetto

Monday, June 6th:  Books Like Breathing

Tuesday, June 7th:  Life in Review

Thursday, June 9th:  Silver and Grace

Monday, June 13th:  Reviews by Lola

Friday, June 24th: Chaotic Compendiums

Thursday, June 30th:  Rundpinne

Friday, July 8th:  Colloquium

Monday, July 11th:  Sara’s Organized Chaos

Friday, July 15th:  Thoughts of Joy

Friday, July 29th:  The Book Lady’s Blog - guest post

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (May 24, 2011)

After losing his job, Lee Kravitz – a man who had always worked too hard, too long, and too intensely – took stock of his life and realized just how disconnected he had become from the people who mattered most to him: his wife, his children, the circle of friends whose ranks had thinned over the years.  Instead of rushing out to try to find a new job, he committed an entire year to attending to the most important things in his life, to reconnecting with those dear to him and to making amends.

In Unfinished Business, Kravitz takes us along on ten transformational journeys, among them repaying a thirty-year-old debt, making a long-overdue condolence call, finding an abandoned relative, and fulfilling a forgotten promise. Along the way, we meet a cast of wonderful characters and travel the globe—to a refugee camp in Kenya, a monastery in California, the desert of southern Iran, a Little League game in upstate New York, and a bar in Kravitz’s native Cleveland. In each instance, his act of reaching out opens new paths for both personal and spiritual growth.

All of us have unfinished business—the things we should have done but just let slip. Kravitz’s story reveals that the things we’ve avoided are exactly those that have the power to transform, enrich, enlarge, and even complete us. The lesson of this book is one applicable to us all: Be mindful of what is most important, and act on it. The rewards will be immediate and lasting.

For more information on Unfinished Business, check out the book’s website, www.myunfinishedbusiness.com.

About Lee Kravitz

Lee Kravitz was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Yale College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

A pioneer in creating multi-platform media for young people, Lee was founding editor of React, an interactive news magazine for teenagers, and an editorial director of Scholastic Inc., the educational publishing company.

Lee most recently was editor-in-chief of Parade, the Sunday newspaper magazine with more than 70 million readers. Under his leadership, Lee’s magazines have received more than 200 awards for journalistic excellence and been widely acclaimed for inspiring Americans of all ages to improve their lives, communities, nation and the world.

Lee has served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including the Public Education Network, The League, National History Day and Youth Service America. He is board president of Youth Communication, a publisher of writing by and for inner-city teens and youth in foster care.

Lee and his wife Elizabeth Kaplan, a literary agent, live in New York City and Clinton Corners, New York, with their three children.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS is Lee’s first book.

Connect with Lee on his website, his blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Lee Kravitz’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, May 23rd:  Patricia’s Wisdom

Tuesday, May 24th:  Silver and Grace

Thursday, May 26th:  Seaside Book Nook

Monday, May 30th:  Life in Review

Monday, June 6th:  Mockingbird Hill Cottage

Monday, June 6th:  Colloquium

Wednesday, June 8th:  Sophisticated Dorkiness

Monday, June 13th:  Joyfully Retired

Wednesday, June 15th:  Arriving at Your Own Door

Thursday, June 16th:  Suko’s Notebook

Hardcover: 256 pages

Publisher: HarperOne (June 7, 2011)

In the tradition of Barbara Brown Taylor and Sue Monk Kidd, Sarah Sentilles offers a poignant, beautifully wrought memoir of her personal crisis of faith.

Sentilles was on the way to becoming a priest when she ultimately faced the truth: she no longer believed. Her moving story examines the question of how you leave the most powerful being in the universe—and, if you do, where do you go? Breaking Up with God is an inspiring reflection no matter where you stand on the matter of faith.

“Honest, like down-to-the-core honest, beyond what most people are capable of, especially in public on the topic of faith.  I admire her as much for her conviction as for her talent as a writer.” —Kelly Corrigan, New York Times bestselling author of The Middle Place

To learn more about Breaking Up with God: A Love Story, check out the book’s page on the Harper Collins website.

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About Sarah Sentilles

Sarah Sentilles is a scholar of religion, an award-winning speaker, and the author of three books including Breaking Up with God: A Love Story, which will be published in June. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a master’s of divinity and a doctorate in theology from Harvard, where she was awarded the Billings Preaching Prize and was the managing editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. At the core of her scholarship, writing, and activism is a commitment to investigating the roles religious language, images, and practices play in oppression, violence, social transformation, and justice movements. She taught critical thinking at California State University Channel Islands for three years and is currently at work on a novel and an edited volume that investigates the intersections of torture and Christianity.

Sarah writes, teaches, and speaks about how to create a more just and life-giving world—and the obstacles people face when trying to do so. She has been invited to speak around the country about creativity, imagination, feminism, theology, faith and doubt, religion and violence, ending state-sponsored torture, and the ethical challenges facing religious communities in the twenty-first century.

To learn more, visit Sarah’s website at www.sarahsentilles.com.

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Sarah Sentilles TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, May 23rd:  Arriving at Your Own Door

Tuesday, May 31st:  Regular Rumination

Friday, June 3rd:  Life in Review

Monday, June 6th:  Ponderings on a Faith Journey

Thursday, June 9th:  Book Reviews by Molly

Monday, June 13th:  Broken Teepee

Monday, June 20th:  Carol’s Notebook

Monday, June 27th:  Book Club Classics!

Wednesday, July 27th:  In the Next Room

TBD:  Colloquium