first loves

"Set in the same world as Half a King, Half a World follows a new protagonist, Thorn, a fifteen-year-old girl in training for the king's army. But even as she's learning the ways of war, she's also growing up...and falling in love for the first time"--.

"Ephram Jenkins has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, "the kind of pretty it hurt to look at," is already quite damaged, but Ephram is forcibly drawn to her. As soon as she becomes a young woman and has any power of her own, Ruby flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York City. Years later, when a funeral forces her to return home, 30-year-old Ruby will find herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town's dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised and stood by him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy"--.

New Jersey detective Harry Rane, forced into early retirement after being shot in the line of duty, agrees to try to negotiate a deal with local crime boss Eddie Fallon for an old friend who has gotten into some trouble on a drug deal, but things get complicated when it turns out Eddie's wife is Harry's own first true love--one he does not want to lose again.

Several years after her husbands passing, Eby decides to sell Lost Lake, it's quaint cottages and memories to a land developer, but when her neice Kate comes to visit with her daughter, Eby begins to think that there is someone in her family that can keep the magic going.

Avery MacTavish runs the pizza place right across the street from the Inn BoonsBoro that Owen Montgomery is renovating, and as the two of them cautiously extend their relationship Owen must work at getting her to realize that her first boyfriend is going to be her last.

In 1960s Norfolk, England, seventeen-year-old Clem Ackroyd lives with his mother and grandmother in a tiny cottage, but his life is transformed when he falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy farmer in this tale that flashes back through the stories of three generations.

This is the story of two small-town former high school sweethearts from opposite sides of the tracks. Now middle-aged, they have taken wildly divergent paths, but neither has lived the life they imagined, and neither can forget the passionate first love that forever altered their world. When they are both called back to their hometown for the funeral of the mentor who once gave them shelter, they will be forced to confront the choices each has made, and ask whether love can truly rewrite the past.

Direct and vivid in its telling of the details of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel manages ultimately to deliver much more. It is the feelings that loom behind those daily events - the social alliances, the shopkeeper's exchange, the fact of death--that give Mrs. Dalloway texture and richness.

An old man reminisces about his first love, a young runaway who taught him more about life than anyone had before or since.