QUICK DELIVERY
Swift dispatch
Where to Begin by Cleo Wade
Where to Begin is a collection of the ideas, mantras, and poems I turn to when I feel like I am losing it. I wrote this so that I could put them all in one place when I felt overwhelmed by worry, fear, anxiety, or helplessness.
The words in this book are what stop me from walking away from the problems of the world during tough times. They also help me stay connected to hope during difficult moments and remind me that even on the days that feel the most daunting, I still have the power to show up and do something, somewhere, in some way.
Change-making comes in all sizes. It doesn’t always have to be one big gesture or nothing. As my friend Jenna often says, “The big stuff is the small stuff.” Your big life is made up of a collection of all of your small moments. Our big world is a made up of a collection of all of our small actions. This book is about where to begin.
Life In No Order: A compilation of sh...
A head scratching, heart stopping collection of stories
Praise for the stories in Life In No Order
GENRE: SHORT STORY
TITLE: OUR BRIEF HEAVENLY HOUR
WRITER: KENDI KARIMI, KENYA
REVIEWER: HALIEO MOTANYANE, LESOTHO
WEBSITE: WRITER'S SPACE AFRICA
Captivity is one of the biggest achievements that a writer should rejoice in whenever their story masters it. For a story to be a masterpiece, the reader should be captivated to the point of not wanting to stop reading while wishing the story should not end.
This is what Kendi Karimi’s story has done to me. Rather than call ‘Our Brief Heavenly Hour’ a short story, it would fit perfectly as a ‘Personal Letter’.
“Kendi, you have a deep-rooted philosophical soul that is unparalleled in verse! Your poetic style is quite unique.”
-LANCE SHERIDAN
Don’t Wait In The Sun, Dance In The Rain
Your prose is so incredibly eloquent. The metaphors you create uniquely elevate your writing. You convey the joy of love, the grief of heartbreak, and the beauty of healing so intimately and powerfully.”
-PHOENIX WILLIAMSON
Number 27
“Wow! This such a motivational and inspiring story. Everyone's lives have dark days and when I am going through mine, this story would keep me alive. This has given the readers (or maybe me) the strength to keep their hopes on guard.”
-KEYA JADAV
Something Full And Round And Fruity
Wowwwww. This was immediately powerful and compelling…I could feel the grief between the lines, the pain, the fear, but also the love.
-KELLY DENNISON
White Men Police Teeth
You are such a commanding writer. Strong, yet subtle compelling me to dive deeper into my consciousness and perception.
-BETH CONNOR
This was absolutely amazing…your use of metaphors really blows me away. This is such a raw and powerful work of art.
-SAPPHIRE
“It’s like you’ve given words to the unexplainable, and yet it’s so effortlessly put that it’s breath-taking.”
-WANGARE
About the book
Stories are never just stories the same way love isn't just love or hate just hate. With love, you make the life-altering decision to live and die by your lover's side when marriage come along. With hate, you bully a child into submission, into self-loathing, into depression.
With stories, you tell about your share of pain and joy, love and hate and in doing so, you knit a lovely invisible creation that sheds light on culture and history as is in your time. You have the chance to immortalize something with a story, a chance to shine the torch on life. These stories, these histories, are poetic, vivid, full.
Life in no order is a collection of short stories that talk about life, in no order.
About the author
Kendi Karim graduated top of her class with first-class honors in Mass Communication. Her short story, What Does It Mean To Be Kind Anyway, was shortlisted for the Wakini Kuria Prize for children’s literature in 2021. ‘Our Brief Heavenly Hour' has also been featured by Writer’s Space Africa and her work has been recognized by BIC group and EUEPA.
A writer for the lovers, dreamers and believers.
For the hope give-ups, and the heart beat-ups.
The Big Chiefs by Meja Mwangi
Men would talk, as men do, about love and money and power and politics and, acting learned, they would try to outdo one another with their knowledge and their understanding of the political realities and the absurd policies, that bred hate and poverty and genocides.
They would ask themselves and one another questions that were often impossible to understand and even harder to answer.
Did bad politics breed poverty or did poverty breed bad politics? Opinions were many and varied. Friends argued and sometimes came to blows over their views.
Those Bones Are Not My Child by Toni ...
In a suspenseful novel of uncommon depth and intensity, Toni Cade Bambara renders a harrowing portrait of a city under siege. Having elected its first black mayor in 1980, Atlanta projected an image of political progressiveness and prosperity. But between September 1979 and June 1981, more than forty black children were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered throughout "The City Too Busy to Hate."
A separated mother of three holding down several jobs, Zala Spencer has managed to survive on the margins of a flourishing economy until she awakens the morning of Sunday, July 20, 1980, to find her teenage son Sonny missing.
As the hours turn into days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children just beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on a desperate search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions.
The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-G...
They are the Beautiful Ones, Loisail’s most notable socialites, and this spring is Nina’s chance to join their ranks, courtesy of her well-connected cousin and his calculating wife. But the Grand Season has just begun, and already Nina’s debut has gone disastrously awry. She has always struggled to control her telekinesis—neighbors call her the Witch of Oldhouse—and the haphazard manifestations of her powers make her the subject of malicious gossip.
When entertainer Hector Auvray arrives to town, Nina is dazzled. A telekinetic like her, he has traveled the world performing his talents for admiring audiences. He sees Nina not as a witch, but ripe with potential to master her power under his tutelage. With Hector’s help, Nina’s talent blossoms, as does her love for him.
But great romances are for fairytales, and Hector is hiding a truth from Nina—and himself—that threatens to end their courtship before it truly begins. The Beautiful Ones is a charming tale of love and betrayal, and the struggle between conformity and passion, set in a world where scandal is a razor-sharp weapon.
A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
When a young man is found gruesomely murdered in a London houseboat, it triggers questions about three women who knew him. Laura is the troubled one-night-stand last seen in the victim’s home. Carla is his grief-stricken aunt, already mourning the recent death of yet another family member. And Miriam is the nosy neighbor clearly keeping secrets from the police.
Three women with separate connections to the victim. Three women who are – for different reasons – simmering with resentment. Who are, whether they know it or not, burning to right the wrongs done to them. When it comes to revenge, even good people might be capable of terrible deeds.
How far might any one of them go to find peace? How long can secrets smolder before they explode into flame?
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.
Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshik...
What would you change if you could go back in time?
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
How to Save a Life by Eva Carter
Kerry Smith is going to save lives--and so is her best friend, Tim Palmer. After years of working towards medical school, they are about to sit for their entrance exams. But on the eve of the new millennium, a classmate goes into cardiac arrest, changing everything.
For nearly eighteen minutes, rising soccer star Joel Greenaway is dead. For nearly eighteen minutes, Kerry performs CPR on her long-time crush. And for nearly eighteen minutes, Tim is too shocked to help. And though they don't yet know it, those eighteen minutes will change the next eighteen years of their lives.
Because as it turns out, saving a life doesn't always guarantee a happy ending.
With his soccer career cut short, Joel lashes out and breaks Kerry's heart by ending their burgeoning relationship with a cruelty that derails her future, while Tim struggles to reconcile his dream of becoming a doctor with the reality of failing to act. As each struggles to move on from the events of that fateful New Year's Eve, their lives can't seem to stop colliding year after year. Pulled by their shared histories and her big heart, Kerry soon finds herself picking up the pieces after both broken men. But when Kerry is the one who needs saving, will anyone be there for her?
As Kerry, Tim, and Joel discover what it means to love, to forgive, and to find your calling, this sweeping novel shows us that there is more than one way to save a life--and more than one path to finding meaning in your own.
The Tommyknockers by Stephen King
Late Last Night and the Night Before ...
... Tommyknockers, tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
Something was happening in Bobbi Anderson's idyllic small town of Haven, Maine. Something that gave every man, woman, and child in town powers far beyond ordinary mortals. Something that turned the town into a death trap for all outsiders. Something that came from a metal object, buried for millennia, that Bobbi accidentally stumbled across.
It wasn't that Bobbi and the other good folks of Haven had sold their souls to reap the rewards of the most deadly evil this side of hell. It was more like a diabolical takeover...an invasion of body and soul--and mind....
If It Bleeds by Stephen King
A collection of four uniquely wonderful long stories, including a stand-alone sequel to The Outsider.
News people have a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads'. And a bomb at Albert Macready Middle School is guaranteed to lead any bulletin.
Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency is working on the case of a missing dog - and on her own need to be more assertive - when she sees the footage on TV. But when she tunes in again, to the late-night report, she realizes there is something not quite right about the correspondent who was first on the scene. So begins 'If It Bleeds' , a stand-alone sequel to The Outsider featuring the incomparable Holly on her first solo case.
Hopeless by Colleen Hoover
Would you rather know a truth that makes you feel hopeless, or keep believing the lies?
Beloved and bestselling author Colleen Hoover returns with the spellbinding story of two young people with devastating pasts who embark on a passionate, intriguing journey to discover the lessons of life, love, trust – and above all, the healing power that only truth can bring.
Sky, a senior in high school, meets Dean Holder, a guy with a promiscuous reputation that rivals her own. From their very first encounter, he terrifies and captivates her. Something about him sparks memories of her deeply troubled past, a time she’s tried so hard to bury. Though Sky is determined to stay far away from him, his unwavering pursuit and enigmatic smile break down her defenses and the intensity of the bond between them grows. But the mysterious Holder has been keeping secrets of his own, and once they are revealed, Sky is changed forever and her ability to trust may be a casualty of the truth.
Only by courageously facing the stark revelations can Sky and Holder hope to heal their emotional scars and find a way to live and love without boundaries. Hopeless is a novel that will leave you breathless, entranced, and remembering your own first love.
Point of Retreat by Colleen Hoover
SOMETIMES TWO PEOPLE HAVE TO FALL APART TO REALISE JUST HOW MUCH THEY BELONG TOGETHER.
As Layken and Will’s emotion-packed story continues, a stunning and unforeseen revelation about Will’s past leaves them questioning everything that they thought they knew about each other. With the foundation of their relationship at risk, they must decide whether they are willing to fight for a future together, or to retreat back into solitude and heartache.
How far does Will have to go to prove to Layken his love for her will last forever? It will require something truly extraordinary to keep this couple together, and the decisions they make and the answers they find will change not only their lives, but the lives of everyone around them.
Devil on the Cross By Ngugi wa Thiongo
One of the cornerstones of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s fame, Devil on the Cross is a powerful fictional critique of capitalism. It tells the tragic story of Wariinga, a young woman who moves from a rural Kenyan town to the capital, Nairobi, only to be exploited by her boss and later by a corrupt businessman. As she struggles to survive, Wariinga begins to realize that her problems are only symptoms of a larger societal malaise and that much of the misfortune stems from the Western, capitalist influences on her country.
An impassioned cry for a Kenya free of dictatorship and for African writers to work in their own local dialects, Devil on the Cross has had a profound influence on Africa and on post-colonial African literature.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
November 9 by Colleen Hoover
Fallon meets Ben, an aspiring novelist, the day before her scheduled cross-country move. Their untimely attraction leads them to spend Fallon’s last day in L.A. together, and her eventful life becomes the creative inspiration Ben has always sought for his novel. Over time and amidst the various relationships and tribulations of their own separate lives, they continue to meet on the same date every year. Until one day Fallon becomes unsure if Ben has been telling her the truth or fabricating a perfect reality for the sake of the ultimate plot twist.
Can Ben’s relationship with Fallon—and simultaneously his novel—be considered a love story if it ends in heartbreak?
The Murmur of Bees by Sofia Segovia
From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own.
As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can―visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats―both human and those of nature―Simonopio’s purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined.
Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.
The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt...
The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a parable inspired by the Chinese play Chalk Circle.
Written at the close of World War II, the story is set in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. It retells the tale of King Solomon and a child claimed by and fought over by two mothers. But this chalk circle is metaphorically drawn around a society misdirected in its priorities. Brecht's statements about class are cloaked in the innocence of a fable that whispers insistently to the audience.
No translations of Brecht's work are as reliable and compelling as Eric Bentley's. These versions are widely viewed as the standard renderings of Brecht's work, ensuring that future generations of readers will come in close contact with the work of a playwright who introduced a new way of thinking about the theater.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone family, and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.
They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
Adam Silvera reminds us that there’s no life without death and no love without loss in this devastating yet uplifting story about two people whose lives change over the course of one unforgettable day.
On September 5, a little after midnight, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to give them some bad news: They’re going to die today.
Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they’re both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There’s an app for that. It’s called the Last Friend, and through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure—to live a lifetime in a single day.