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"A memoir by Vanessa O'Brien, record-breaking American-British explorer, takes you on an unexpected journey to the top of the world's highest mountains"--
From Julie Murphy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dumplin’, comes the exciting conclusion in the origin story of fan-favorite comic character Faith—a fierce, plus-size superhero. Faith Herbert can finally admit that she’s not a regular teen—and take advantage of her new flying superpowers. After the chaos of her first semester, Faith just wants to end her senior year in a normal way—enjoying all the hallmarks of graduating high school, like prom, with her best friends Matt and Ches. But a cryptic warning about psiots going missing and a rash of inexplicable fires means things are off to a strange start. Life goes from weird to worse when Colleen Bristow, the quiet nerd-turned-supervillain, reappears, acting like nothing ever happened. As if that weren’t enough, rumored sightings of Faith’s ex, the beautiful Dakota Ash, who was thought to have died months ago in the warehouse fire that exposed more than a few secrets, start to emerge. Faith can’t seem to shake Dakota’s betrayal from that tragic day, but she also can’t help hoping the rumors are true. . . . As Faith tries to balance her quest for a memorable senior year and the heartbreak of Grandma Lou’s increasing decline, she learns to have faith in herself—and that sometimes fate will point you in the right direction.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This gripping and triumphant memoir from the author of The Mountain follows a living legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000-meter summit at a time. “From the drama of the peaks, to the struggle of making a living as a professional climber, to the basic how-tos of life at 26,000 feet, No Shortcuts to the Top is fascinating reading.”—Aron Ralston, author of Between a Rock and a Hard Place and subject of the film 127 Hours For eighteen years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail: to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go. A preternaturally cautious climber who once turned back 300 feet from the top of Everest but who would not shrink from a peak (Annapurna) known to claim the life of one climber for every two who reached its summit, Viesturs lives by an unyielding motto, “Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” It is with this philosophy that he vividly describes fatal errors in judgment made by his fellow climbers as well as a few of his own close calls and gallant rescues. And, for the first time, he details his own pivotal and heroic role in the 1996 Everest disaster made famous in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. In addition to the raw excitement of Viesturs’s odyssey, No Shortcuts to the Top is leavened with many funny moments revealing the camaraderie between climbers. It is more than the first full account of one of the staggering accomplishments of our time; it is a portrait of a brave and devoted family man and his beliefs that shaped this most perilous and magnificent pursuit.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Book • When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. But when she falls in love with and marries Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated. Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The Great Man can’t concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father’s last, best hope. Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It’s about the love between women and men, and children and parents; about the things we give up in the face of adversity; and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse. LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, New York Public Library, BookPage, and BookRiot • “Quiara Alegría Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton and In the Heights Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio—even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories—but first she’d have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She’d have to find her language. Weaving together Hudes’s love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a multimythic dive into home, memory, and belonging—narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.
Voted "BEST SELF-PUBLISHED NOVEL of 2013" by Underground Book Reviews. City Book Review FIVE STAR SELECTION. "An instant classic! Go out right now and buy it!" It is 1999 in San Francisco. The dot.com boom is in full swing, and it seems as though every twenty-something has become an instant millionaire except our narrator, who has just arrived from the Midwest without a job. Confronted with the chilling prospect of missing out on the greatest cash grab of the twentieth century, he enlists with a temp agency. That's when things start getting strange. Mistaken by the agency for an urbane homosexual instead of the ex-frat boy he really is, he is assigned to a fully-staffed mansion in the Pacific Heights neighborhood. His new boss? Definitely not the old matron he was expecting. Bailey Phelan is the gorgeous, thirty-year-old wife of an aging billionaire, and her penchant for Prada, recreational drugs, and foreign boyfriends quickly has the narrator running in circles trying to keep her exorbitant spending and romantic misadventures under wraps. But despite all the glitz, what she might need most is a friend. As the narrator gets sucked deeper into the mansion milieu oversexed nannies, a lovelorn gay chef, the obsessive head housekeeper, the bilious billionaire himself he's faced with the unavoidable question: will the six-figure salary and over-the-top lifestyle of the rich and infamous corrupt him -- or will he cut and run with his soul intact?
Samurai, assassins, warlords -- and a girl who likes to climb A historical coming-of-age tale of a young girl who is purchased away from her family to become an assassin. Can she come to terms with who she must be? Though Japan has been devastated by a century of civil war, Risuko just wants to climb trees. Growing up far from the battlefields and court intrigues, the fatherless girl finds herself pulled into a plot that may reunite Japan -- or may destroy it. She is torn from her home and what is left of her family, but finds new friends at a school that may not be what it seems. One of the students — or perhaps one of the teachers — is playing the kitsune. The mischievous fox spirit is searching for… something. What do they want? And what will they do to find it? Magical but historical, Risuko follows her along the first dangerous steps to discovering who she truly is. The first volume of the Seasons of the Sword series! Can one girl win a war? Kano Murasaki, called Risuko (Squirrel) is a young, fatherless girl, more comfortable climbing trees than down on the ground. Yet she finds herself enmeshed in a game where the board is the whole nation of Japan, where the pieces are armies, moved by scheming lords, and a single girl couldn't possibly have the power to change the outcome. Or could she? Historical adventure fiction appropriate for teen readers As featured in Kirkus, Foreword, and on the cover of Publishers Weekly! Tight, exciting, and thoughtful... The characters are nicely varied and all the pieces fit into place deftly. -- Kirkus Reviews Risuko is an artfully crafted novel that evokes a heavy sense of place and enchantment.... Risuko's development and evolution are fascinating to watch in this powerful and relentless coming-of-age adventure. -- Foreword Reviews (spotlight review) Vividly portrayed, flush with cultural detail, and smoothly written. -- BookLife
Travel to the top of the world’s highest mountains with this this riveting and uplifting memoir that “is a rare mix of heart-stopping adventure and powerful self-reflection” (Johanna Garton, author of Edge of the Map) by Vanessa O’Brien, record-breaking American British explorer. Long before she became the first American woman to summit K2 and the first British woman to return from its summit alive, Vanessa O’Brien was a feisty suburban Detroit teenager forced to reinvent her world in the wake of a devastating loss that destroyed her family. Making her own way in the world, Vanessa strove to reach her lofty ambitions. Soon, armed with an MBA and a wry sense of humor, she climbed the corporate ladder to great success, but after the 2009 economic meltdown, her career went into a tailspin. She searched for a new purpose and settled on an unlikely goal: climbing Mount Everest. When her first attempt ended in disaster, she trudged home, humbled but wiser. Two years later, she made it to the top of the world. And then she kept going. Grounded by a cadre of wise-cracking friends and an inimitable British spouse, Vanessa held her own in the intensely competitive world of mountaineering, summiting the highest peak on every continent, and skiing the last degree to the North and South Poles. She set new speed records for the Seven Summits, receiving a Guinness World Record and the Explorers Grand Slam, and finally made peace with her traumatic past. During her attempt on K2, she very nearly gave up. But on the “savage mountain,” which kills one out of every four climbers who summit, Vanessa evolved from an adventurer out to challenge herself to an explorer with a high-altitude perspective on a changing world—and a new call to share her knowledge and passion across the globe. Told with heart and humor, To the Greatest Heights is a “vicariously engaging addition to the literature on mountaineering as well as a beacon of inspiration” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).