Valancy Stirling, an inhibited twenty-nine-year-old spinster, undergoes a total personality change when a doctor tells her she has no more than one year to live. Oppressed by family and small-town prejudice, her apparently imminent death gives her the courage to assert herself and seek love.

Mr. Hacker begins to regret his move from the noisy city to the quiet country, until he is befriended by a stray cat and dog.

Henry, feeling lonely on a street without any other children, finds companionship and love in a big dog named Mudge.

Big Wolf has always lived alone at the top of a hill under a tree, so when a little wolf suddenly arrives one day, he does not know what to think.

In Harmony, Texas, twenty-year-old Reagan Truman has found her place and her family. But with her uncle taken ill and her friend Noah lost and disheartened with his life, Reagan is afraid of ending up alone again- and she's not the only one. Harmony seems to be full of people yearning to make a connection. Like funeral director Tyler Wright, who longs to take his relationship with his friend Kate to the next level, but doesn't know how. And Ronelle...

"A haunting, provocative novel, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a fictional autobiography in an alternate twentieth century that chronicles one woman's unusual life, including the price she pays to survive and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save. Born at the end of the old world, Miriam grows up during The Great Reckoning, a sprawling, decades-long war that nearly decimates humanity and strips her of friends and family....

"A guide intended to help readers become less lonely"--

"Sometimes when you are most in need of friends, they will flock to you -- or at least to your hat" -- On back cover.

"A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships. In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences."--

"Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency by Jokha Alharthi. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman's attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and to envisage an adulthood in which her own power and happiness might find the freedom necessary to bear fruit and flourish. Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, is caught between the past and the present. As she attempts...