The New York Times–bestselling, inspiring true story of how one couple's love changed a community.Growing up homeless in Kibera, a slum in Kenya, Kennedy Odede received a book of Martin Luther King's speeches that changed his life and inspired him to start Shining Hope for Communities, a local youth group. Several years later, irrepressible Wesleyan student Jessica Posner traveled to Kenya to work with SHOFCO. Soon, she and Kennedy fell in love. After retur...

Find Me Unafraid tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor. With a Foreword by Nicholas Kristof.This is the story of two young people from completely different worlds: Kennedy Odede from Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, and Jessica Posner from Denver, Colorado. Kennedy foraged for food, lived on the street, and taught himself to read with old n...

Days after Alex Cooper told her parents that she was gay, they drove Alex from their home in Southern California to Utah, where they signed over guardianship to fellow Mormons who promised to save Alex from her homosexuality.For eight harrowing months, Alex was held captive in an unlicensed “residential treatment program,” modeled on the many “therapeutic” boot camps scattered across Utah. Alex was physically and verbally abused, and forced to stand facing a wall for up to eighteen...

A gripping, inspiring, and eye-opening memoir of fortitude and survival—of a twelve-year-old boy’s traumatic flight from Afghanistan to the West—that puts a face to one of the most shocking and devastating humanitarian crises of our time.“To risk my life had to mean something. Otherwise what was it all for?”In 2006, after his father was killed, Gulwali Passarlay was caught between the Taliban who wanted to recruit him, and the Americans who wanted to use him. To pr...

From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process writt...

From the international bestselling author of The Book of Fate comes the story, based on real events, of a four-year-old boy who cannot speak and the shame it brings upon his family in modern-day Iran.Four-year-old Shahaab has not started talking. The family doctor believes there is no cause for concern; nevertheless, Shahaab is ridiculed by others who call him “dumb.” In his innocent and deeply hurt child’s mind, he begins to believe that the “good” and “i...

A riveting, real-life equivalent of The Kite Runner—an astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women’s rights in the Muslim world.Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender...

This gripping true story follows a biologist's human-powered journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Arctic to rediscover her love of birds, nature, and adventure—perfect for fans of Cheryl Strayed.During graduate school, as she conducted experiments on the peculiarly misshapen beaks of chickadees, ornithologist Caroline Van Hemert began to feel stifled in the isolated, sterile environment of the lab. Worried that she was losing her passion for the scientific res...

Expert instructor, Michael Chaskalson, who teaches on an acclaimed university-based mindfulness programme, brings new ease to practising the art of Mindfulness in his do-it-yourself, step-by-step guide – Mindfulness in Eight Weeks.Praised by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Excellence and prescribed by the NHS, Mindfulness is fast becoming a revered and popular method used by healthcare professionals and lay people alike to help alleviate anxiety, depression and stress. I...

*Now a major motion picture—Rob Peace—starring Jay Will, Mary J. Blige, and Chiwetel Ejiofor**Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, and more* The New York Times bestselling account of a young African-American man who escaped Newark, NJ, to attend Yale, but still faced the dangers of the streets when he returned is, “nuanced and shattering” (People) and “mesmeric” (...

A harrowing and heartwrenching memoir of humanitarian aid worker Jessica Buchanan’s kidnapping by Somali land pirates, her three months in captivity, her rescue by the Navy SEALs, and her husband’s extraordinary efforts to help bring her home.In 2006, twenty-seven-year-old Jessica Buchanan arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, with a teaching degree and long-held dreams of helping to educate African children. By 2009, she had met and married the man of her dreams, a native Sw...

In this heartwarming story, perfect for fans of An Unexpected Grace and A Dog’s Way Home, a single mom learns that her chronically ill son can communicate with a very special dog—and the lessons this dog teaches can shape the future and transform their lives. And what Whistler inspires in Kate and Jasper may be his most important lesson of all.