Matthew Nix, age twenty, yearns to grow Nix Welding, even though his grandfather, father, and aunt are content with the way things are. Small. Status quo. Good enough.

In 1902 in tiny Poseyville, Indiana, Matthew’s grea-great-grandfather opened the blacksmith shop that became Nix Welding. He thwacked a cross peen hammer onto white-hot iron to shape it into submission on an anvil. Nearly 100 years later, despite family pushback, Matthew looks beyond the cornfields that his family thinks confine Nix Welding. He works his own kind of forge, to bend, mold, and expand the business, often finding himself in his own self-stoked fire as a trial-by-error entrepreneur.

Forging Ahead reveals how Matthew, now CEO, and the team he methodically curated leaned on small-town values and faith to transform humble Nix Welding into Nix Industrial, a revered custom manufacturing and industrial repair powerhouse. Today Nix Industrial is one of the fastest growing companies in America.

Author Angie Klink paints a vivid portrait of a business saga from America’s heartland. Forging Ahead is a family tale, a coming-of-age story, a business handbook, and a letter to future generations.

On a warm Galilean night, Mary and Joseph get to know each other (in the biblical sense) in a secluded garden in Nazareth. Nine months later, Mary’s pious mother, seeing that her young, unwed daughter is pregnant, enlists the help of a pompous high priest to characterize the pregnancy as divine, of God’s seed. When Mary refuses to go along with her mother’s scheme, she and Joseph enter a battle with her parents over every aspect of the birth and the fate of their baby.

As word of a miraculous virgin birth spreads through Bethlehem, factions form, and allegiances shift among unscrupulous shepherds, dubious Wise Men, an elderly innkeeper, an earnest but malodorous peasant and an aging cat with a penchant for prophecy—all trying to answer the crucial question: Is the baby named Jesus truly the Son of God or merely a mortal born of earthly parents?

An American woman in Tokyo is planning to leave her lover when a tragedy strikes the nation. In a lounge in the Ginza district, an expat pianist wonders if a room in the back helps desperate men start new lives. A Japanese woman in San Francisco is searching for a consulate staff member, who has vanished with a suitcase full of passports.

Set in Tokyo and San Francisco, these stories are colorful postcards reporting from cultural intersections. A medley of voices and fresh takes on the expat experience, these intimately detailed portraits show American and Japanese characters enchanted with intercultural love while also facing the history they share. A long-time resident of Tokyo, Gattig writes with a light, witty touch and supple, poetic prose, showing how we need others to understand ourselves in the world.

ARE YOU WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE?

Briggens House, Essex 1940. An unassuming country house, home of the Polish Army in exile, houses in its basement a secret Special Operations Executive (SOE) unit where all the forged documents needed by the Allies are made. Here identities are created for agents dropped into enemy territory. Their lives depend on these documents looking authentic.

Peter and Elisabeth start an affair while working at Briggens House but lose touch soon after the war ends. Why then, forty years later, does she leave him something in her will?

Peter resolves to find out, discovering the extraordinary life she led after the war and the passionate affair that informed the choices she made and the person she became. But Peter, too, is changed by the journey, discovering new ways of seeing his past.
Using detailed research into the workings of this crucial but little-known SOE unit, Ipseity weaves a tender, passionate love story with the deception and intrigue of the fascinating world of wartime forgery.

Raised in a household of poverty and an oppressive, fear-based religion she longs to escape, Holly Mayes finds herself drawn from the dispiriting constraints of her childhood into another confining world—one where men call all the shots. Although temporarily enamored by the money, glamour, and popularity of the world of exotic dancing, the confidence she finds on the stripper pole as she captivates and manipulates men eventually turns to disdain and hopelessness.

In her pursuit of purpose and passion, the same strength that she used to navigate the stage at the Dreamgirls club becomes her lifeline to a better future. Despite fateful choices, misfortune, and missteps, she finds resilience and redemption in the power of her dreams, and in turn, a purpose beyond money and fame.

How did a thirty-six-year-old marketing manager with no math or science background transform herself into an aerospace engineer? What strategies enabled a failed kindergarten teacher to later thrive as a consultant for nearly every top MBA program in the world? What surprising techniques did a paralyzed twenty-five-year-old use to beat the odds and make a miraculous recovery? And are there threads of wisdom that can be drawn from each of their stories that make a unifying case for how to succeed? Amazingly, yes!

Many “success” books describe how world-class people became world-class. Outsmart the Learning Curve explores the journeys of seven ordinary people who made extraordinary transformations or overcame significant obstacles. Their stories are interwoven with the science-backed strategies they used to overcome adversity.

Outsmart the Learning Curve provides accessible, achievable, and practical solutions for the rest of us (non-world-class people). It will inspire you to improve your life, further your success, or perhaps make the dramatic transformation you’ve been thinking about. More importantly, it provides tools and techniques to make it happen.

What if your parents weren’t really your parents?
What if somebody you loved kept a deep, dark secret from you for your entire life?
What if your real family was right next door all along?

In the summer of 2021, when author Margo Reilly published her tell-all memoir, When the Apple Falls from the Tree, she hadn’t a single clue that an at-home DNA test kit would send her midlife identity crisis further into uncharted waters.

When You Shake the Family Tree is a vulnerable sharing of Margo’s search for self. An emotional quest of connecting the dots that suddenly made her whole life make sense. Rejection and family secrets were themes she knew all too well. Her jaw-dropping DNA discovery journey will force you to grab your tissues and question whether you’ve been told the truth by your family.

Dive into these pages to learn how Margo followed her intuition to uncover who she truly is.

Diane’s life story reads like fiction, but it’s all very real. Through a series of compelling conversations, she shares intimate memories filled with hardship and resilience. In 1969, she is forced to leave her childhood home in an English village to move to a tenement in the South Bronx. This major culture shock is then compounded by years of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse by her parents. Diane gets pregnant at fourteen and starts living on the streets. Along the way, she encounters a series of “angels” who help her survive.

Despite a series of abusive romantic relationships as an adult, Diane manages to create a new life for herself and her eight children. Diane finds some happiness when the father of her first child kicks his longtime heroin addiction. After ten years together, he dies. Diane discovers a new sense of spiritual faith when her mother suddenly reappears in her life. Despite the years of childhood abuse, Diane eventually forgives her mother and welcomes her into her home. As they make a new life together, Diane’s story becomes one of grace and mercy.

Throughout her life, Diane offers an interesting perspective on race relations. She is white but lives almost entirely in an African-American culture.

“I want a tribunal. A three-judge truth and reconciliation thing. I want her to answer for everything.”

In late middle age, Kate Laidlaw begins to examine her troubled relationship with her mother, now ninety-three and confined to memory care. Her tribunal ranges widely, from the Omaha of her mother’s childhood to the small coastal town of Santa Maria, California, where Kate grew up in a household dominated by her stepfather. It leads through the triumphs and heartbreaks of Kate’s school life and to the bedroom where her stepfather undressed her. It forces her to look at her mother’s early trauma and at the darkest hours of Kate’s own long marriage.

As Kate cares and advocates for her mother and her anger and bitterness subside, other feelings emerge: the tenderness that comes with caring for a loved one and the undeniable bonds of kinship.

With this brilliant debut novel, written in exquisite and evocative prose, Anne Matlack Evans offers a fresh perspective on childhood trauma, on the lessons taught by family, and on the universal longing for grace and wisdom.

Who am I? This question leaves us without words. We’ve reached our threshold in the modern era. As we search for our soul, we must peel into the characters we play and the roles we’ve established to experience physical reality. From the narratives of our ancestors to the boom of technology, we are left with confusion, navigating the modern world at a speed the human species have yet encountered.

Getting to know Ralph Berg, the pioneering open-heart surgeon, was not easy. Many years passed before he was willing to divulge what informed so much of his later work: Jason, his youngest son. But Ralph Berg’s own story began many decades before Jason’s birth.

Ralph became a doctor during World War II and quickly grew fascinated with the human heart. After his chest residency, he assembled a remarkable heart and research team that helped bring open-heart surgery and advanced surgical procedures on blue babies to Spokane, Washington, in 1959. Then, in 1969, with the medical community on the cusp of discovering the cause and treatment of heart attacks, Jason was born to Ralph and Mary Berg—a doomed blue baby.

Learn how Ralph Berg sought to save his son and how he and Dr. Francis Everhart developed the lauded Spokane Experience protocol. Witness the joy Ralph shared with Jason and his family. Blue Baby and Acute Coronary Revascularization is a powerful story about hope, innovation, and the love of family.