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  Holding Fire - A Reckoning with...

  Bryce Andrews

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  From the award-winning author of Down from the Mountain, a memoir of inheritance, history, and one gun’s role in the violence that shaped the American West—and an impassioned call to forge a new way forward 
  Bryce Andrews was raised to do no harm. The son of a pacifist and conscientious objector, he moved from Seattle to Montana to tend livestock and the land as a cowboy. For a decade, he was happy. Yet, when Andrews inherited his grandfather’s Smith & Wesson revolver, he felt the weight of the violence braided into his chosen life. Other white men who’d come before him had turned firearms like this one against wildlife, wilderness, and the Indigenous peoples who had lived in these landscapes for millennia. This was how the West was “won.” Now, the losses were all around him and a weapon was in his hand. 
  In precise, elegiac prose, Andrews chronicles his journey to forge a new path for himself, and to reshape one handgun into a tool for good work. As waves of gun violence swept the country and wildfires burned across his beloved valley, he began asking questions—of ranchers, his Native neighbors, his family, and a blacksmith who taught him to shape steel—in search of a new way to live with the land and with one another. In laying down his arms, he transformed an inherited weapon, his ranch, and the arc of his life. 
  Holding Fire is a deeply felt memoir of one Western heart’s wild growth, and a personal testament to how things that seem permanent—inheritance, legacies of violence, forged steel—can change. 
  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

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  The Loneliness Files

  Athena Dixon

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  What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness. 
   
   
   
  Living alone as a middle-aged woman without children or pets and working forty hours a week from home, more than three hundred fifty miles from her family and friends, Dixon begins watching mystery videos on YouTube, listening to true crime podcasts, and playing video game walk-throughs just to hear another human voice. She discovers the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died alone, her body remaining in front of a glowing television set for three years before the world finally noticed. Searching for connection, Dixon plumbs the depths of communal loneliness, asking essential questions of herself and all of us: How have her past decisions left her so alone? Are we, as humans, linked by a shared loneliness? How do we see the world and our place in it? And finally, how do we find our way back to each other? 
   
   
   
  Searing and searching, The Loneliness Files is a groundbreaking memoir in essays that ultimately brings us together in its piercing, revelatory examination of how and why it is that we break apart.

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  Because I Loved You - Surviving...

  Stephanie Duran

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  What if the greatest act of love… was letting go? 
  Because I Loved You is a breathtaking memoir that begins as a once-in-a-lifetime love story and transforms into a courageous, heart-wrenching journey through terminal illness and the powerful, legal choice to die with dignity in California. 
  When Stephanie met Jeff, during a chance encounter, their connection was immediate, electric, and undeniable. They built a life full of laughter, dreams, and quiet mornings together — until a diagnosis changed everything. Faced with the cruel reality of a terminal illness, they found themselves confronting the unimaginable: how to say goodbye with grace, intention, and love. 
  This book is not just about death, it's about life. About what it means to stand beside the person you love most as they choose how they leave this world. It's about honoring their wishes, navigating heartbreak, and finding the strength to begin again when the person you thought you'd grow old with is gone. Through sharing their story, with Jeff’s blessing, she aims to open dialogue around the taboo-topic of dying with dignity while offering hope, awareness, and inspiration in the face of one of life’s most difficult choices. 
  Raw, vulnerable, and deeply human, Because I Loved You invites you into the sacred space between love and loss, courage and surrender, holding on and letting go. For anyone who has ever been a caregiver, lost someone too soon, or faced the ache of goodbye, this story will hold your heart and remind you: you can grieve and still choose joy. You can love and still release. You can lose someone and still find your way home.

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  Just Leaves

  Lauren Best

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  Welcome to a poet's introspective world of jubilance and turbulence, where life's cresting waves of love, grief, and rebirth collide with the profound power of poetry. 
  In Just Leaves, Lauren Best offers confessional glimpses into a deeply personal odyssey, unraveling the intricate threads of identity, creativity, and the human experience. With quirky candour, Best's immersive reflections celebrate the complexities that define us all. 
  Bringing vibrancy to the depths of personal growth and discovery, she invites listeners inwards to feel the emotional resonance of language: "We all know words are arrows we have felt in our hearts". Through thoughtfully crafted contemplation and playful exploration, Best unveils a fierce tenderness that fuels her artistry, motherhood, and pursuit of balance in an era that craves vulnerability. 
  While still recovering from profound loss and trauma, Best was chosen to be Owen Sound's Poet Laureate (2017-2019) and began creating the poems in this collection. As she traversed the complexities of her own life story, her tenure became a transformative exploration of self, power, and the healing force of poetry. Exploring sound and lyrical storytelling, these poems build on her work as a musician and songwriter. The words rhythmically pulse, swaying from intellectual to sensory. 
  Evocative language drips with sensual longing, entwining embodied motion and emotion both viscerally and visually. The impact of words cascades through the audiobook, connecting experiences across time to braid together the nostalgic past, raw and precious present, and effervescent glow of an optimistic future. 
  Perfect for poetry enthusiasts and newcomers, especially those who love the works of Anne Michaels and Mary Oliver. 
  Embark on an unforgettable journey guided by a distinctive Canadian voice, offering a front-row seat to savour the extraordinary and appreciate the familiar with heartfelt wonder.

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  Web of Betrayal - Murder in...

  Nicola Tallant

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  'Nicola Tallant, not for the first time, demonstrates why she is the very best writer on crime. No novelist alive could ever imagine the very complex and very dark human dramas that she skilfully unravels, delivering page after page of truth-telling that we must pay attention to' -  Darragh MacIntyreFrom the author of the 2023 bestselling Cocaine Cowboys, murder and deception and the underworld of Irish gangland intertwine in a deadly dance of power and survival.A murder in Belfast of gangland's most wanted man, Robbie Lawlor, uncovers a web of betrayal that spans out across the Irish underworld and beyond. Follow a bloody trail that leads all the way into the heart of one of the worst gang feuds Ireland has ever seen which culminates in the Narco style dismemberment of a teenage boy, Keane Mulready Woods.  And as the curtain is pulled back on the inner workings of the world of organised crime, a cast of ruthless characters take centre stage for their place in a double cross plot that reads like a fast-paced thriller.

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  Finding My Way - A Memoir of...

  Robin F. Schepper

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  A deeply personal memoir about finding family and belonging from White House staffer Robin F. Schepper.  
   
  Growing up torn between her single Pan Am–stewardess mom and brothel-owning grandmother in 1960s New York City, Robin F. Schepper never imagined that she’d one day have an office in the East Wing of the White House. Her childhood in a German American neighborhood on the Upper East Side was peppered with half-truths, from the family secrets surrounding her grandmother’s immigration to deceptions about her biological father.  
   
  In a world of self-absorbed adults, Robin largely raised herself: she secured a scholarship to a prestigious private school and worked several jobs as a teenager to pay her own living expenses before finally escaping to California for college. Street-smart and undeniably driven, once in the professional world Robin quickly ascended in the male-dominated political sphere, traveling the globe while being subjected to sexual harassment and assaults that echoed obstacles her mother and grandmother had faced. Through it all, Robin searched for her biological father. She felt that if she could understand why he abandoned her, she could free herself from secrets, lies, and shame.  
   
  Robin eventually rose to work for the First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama and, in the meantime, created her own family by adopting two sons from Kazakhstan. Intimate and captivating, Finding My Way follows an ambitious woman who reached the highest pinnacles of a political career while simultaneously fulfilling her own quest to heal from family trauma and discover her true identity. 

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