13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do by Amy Morin

Expanding on her viral post that has become an international phenomenon, a psychotherapist offers simple yet effective solutions for increasing mental strength and finding happiness and success in life.

As a licensed clinical social worker, college psychology instructor, and psychotherapist, Amy Morin has seen countless people choose to succeed despite facing enormous challenges. That resilience inspired her to write 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do, a web post that instantly went viral, and was picked up by the Forbes website.

Morin’s post focused on the concept of mental strength, how mentally strong people avoid negative behaviors—feeling sorry for themselves, resenting other people’s success, and dwelling on the past. Instead, they focus on the positive to help them overcome challenges and become their best.

In this inspirational, affirmative book, Morin expands upon her original message, providing practical strategies to help readers avoid the thirteen common habits that can hold them back from success. Combining compelling anecdotal stories with the latest psychological research, she offers strategies for avoiding destructive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors common to everyone.

Like physical strength, mental strength requires healthy habits, exercise, and hard work. Morin teaches you how to embrace a happier outlook and arms you to emotionally deal with life’s inevitable hardships, setbacks, and heartbreaks—sharing for the first time her own poignant story of tragedy, and how she summoned the mental strength to move on. As she makes clear, mental strength isn’t about acting tough; it’s about feeling empowered to overcome life's challenges.

Pages: 272 pages
Publisher: William Morrow (December 23, 2014)

Leaving Before The Rain Comes by Alexandra Fuller

A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller’s own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and about the family she left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a memoir of such grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage, that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller.

Leaving Before the Rains Come begins with the dreadful first years of the American financial crisis when Fuller’s delicate balance—between American pragmatism and African fatalism, the linchpin of her unorthodox marriage—irrevocably fails. Recalling her unusual courtship in Zambia—elephant attacks on the first date, sick with malaria on the wedding day—Fuller struggles to understand her younger self as she overcomes her current misfortunes. Fuller soon realizes what is missing from her life is something that was always there: the brash and uncompromising ways of her father, the man who warned his daughter that "the problem with most people is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live." Fuller’s father—"Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode" as he first introduced himself to his future wife—was a man who regretted nothing and wanted less, even after fighting harder and losing more than most men could bear.

Leaving Before the Rains Come showcases Fuller at the peak of her abilities, threading panoramic vistas with her deepest revelations as a fully grown woman and mother. Fuller reveals how, after spending a lifetime fearfully waiting for someone to show up and save her, she discovered that, in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves.

An unforgettable book, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a story of sorrow grounded in the tragic grandeur and rueful joy only to be found in Fuller’s Africa.

Pages: 274
Publisher: The Penguin Press (January 22, 2015)

The Big Book of Sides by Rick Rodgers

Whether planning a quick dinner after work or a holiday meal for a crowd, you will never be stumped for a side dish again.
 
Side dishes make the meal. Think about it: What’s a burger without fries, turkey without stuffing, or barbecue without coleslaw, baked beans, or macaroni and cheese—or all three? The Big Book of Sides contains more than 450 delicious recipes to complement any dish. Award-winning cooking teacher and author Rick Rodgers has carefully compiled a variety of wonderful options, from traditional to inspired, Americana to ethnic, Southern fare to California cuisine. Sections include “Eat Your Vegetables,” “From the Root Cellar,” “A Hill of Beans,” “Righteous Rice and Great Grains,” and “Pasta and Friends.”
 
The Big Book of Sides shares
 
• more than 100 information-packed entries on vegetables alone, from artichokes to zucchini, including root vegetables and grains
• tutorials on the cooking techniques you need to know, such as grilling and deep-frying
• at-a-glance charts for a variety of perfectly roasted vegetables and freshly cooked beans
• carefree menu planning, with a complete list of special-occasion meals and suggested side dishes
 
Home cooks of all levels will delight in preparing Roasted Summer Squash with Pepitas and Cilantro; Chard Puttanesca; Parsnip, Apple, and Bacon Hash; Smoked Gouda Mashed Potatoes; Quinoa with Carrot and Mint; Farro, Cherry, and Feta Salad; and Butternut Squash and Potato Gratin. Rodgers also shares recipes for relishes, chutneys, pickles, baked goods (from biscuits to foccacia), and even sauces.
 
With helpful tips on how to stock your pantry, easy-to-follow cooking techniques, gorgeous color photos, and main dish pairing suggestions, The Big Book of Sides is sure to become a trusted staple in your kitchen.

Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (October 28, 2014)

Long Walk Home by Lilian Darcy

Everyone has baggage by the time they’re into their thirties.

When single mom and Marietta High School teacher Gemma Clayton acquires a strong, family-oriented and very good-looking new neighbor over her back fence, she’s not put off by his complicated past as the attraction flares between them. Her own past is a very different matter, however.

Nobody knows what she went through on the night of the 1996 Marietta High School senior prom, between running after Judd and Garth Newell’s car as it left River Bend Park and limping into her friend Neve Shepherd’s street two hours later.

But Gemma’s secrets have been rusted up inside her for so long that not even a gorgeous man like Dylan Saddler can help her to break them free.

Pages: 306 pages
Publisher: Tule Publishing Group (November 3, 2014)

The Bishop's Wife by Mette Ivie Harrison

In the predominantly Mormon city of Draper, Utah, some seemingly perfect families have deadly secrets.

Linda Wallheim is a devout Mormon, the mother of five boys and the wife of a bishop. But Linda is increasingly troubled by her church’s structure and secrecy, especially as a disturbing situation takes shape in her ward. One cold winter night, a young wife and mother named Carrie Helm disappears, leaving behind everything she owns. Carrie’s husband, Jared, claims his wife has always been unstable and that she has abandoned the family, but Linda doesn’t trust him. As Linda snoops in the Helm family’s circumstances, she becomes convinced that Jared has murdered his wife and painted himself as a wronged husband.

Linda’s husband asks her not to get involved in the unfolding family saga. But Linda has become obsessed with Carrie’s fate, and with the well-being of her vulnerable young daughter. She cannot let the matter rest until she finds out the truth. Is she wrong to go against her husband, the bishop, when her inner convictions are so strong?

Inspired by a chilling true crime and written by a practicing Mormon, The Bishop’s Wife is both a fascinating look at the lives of modern Mormons as well as a grim and cunningly twisted mystery.

Series: A Linda Wallheim Novel
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Soho Crime (December 30, 2014)

Dorothy Parker Drank Here by Ellen Meister

The acid-tongued Dorothy Parker is back and haunting the halls of the Algonquin with her piercing wit, audacious voice, and unexpectedly tender wisdom.

Heavenly peace? No, thank you. Dorothy Parker would rather wander the famous halls of the Algonquin Hotel, drink in hand, searching for someone, anyone, who will keep her company on this side of eternity.

After forty years she thinks she’s found the perfect candidate in Ted Shriver, a brilliant literary voice of the 1970s, silenced early in a promising career by a devastating plagiarism scandal. Now a prickly recluse, he hides away in the old hotel slowly dying of cancer, which he refuses to treat. If she can just convince him to sign the infamous guestbook of Percy Coates, Dorothy Parker might be able to persuade the jaded writer to spurn the white light with her. Ted, however, might be the only person living or dead who’s more stubborn than Parker, and he rejects her proposal outright.  

When a young, ambitious TV producer, Norah Wolfe, enters the hotel in search of Ted Shriver, Parker sees another opportunity to get what she wants. Instead, she and Norah manage to uncover such startling secrets about Ted’s past that the future changes for all of them.

Pages: 336
Publisher: Putnam Adult (February 24, 2015)

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny

Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sûreté du Québec, has found a peace he’d only imagined possible. On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. “There is a balm in Gilead,” his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the dust jacket, “to make the wounded whole.”

While Gamache doesn’t talk about his wounds and his balm, Clara tells him about hers. Peter, her artist husband, has failed to come home. Failed to show up as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. She wants Gamache’s help to find him. Having finally found sanctuary, Gamache feels a near revulsion at the thought of leaving Three Pines. “There’s power enough in Heaven,” he finishes the quote as he contemplates the quiet village, “to cure a sin-sick soul.” And then he gets up. And joins her.

Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, they journey deeper and deeper into Québec. And deeper and deeper into the soul of Peter Morrow. A man so desperate to recapture his fame as an artist, he would sell that soul. And may have. The journey takes them further and further from Three Pines, to the very mouth of the great St. Lawrence river.  To an area so desolate, so damned, the first mariners called it the land God gave to Cain. And there they discover the terrible damage done by a sin-sick soul.

Pages: 373 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books (August 26, 2014)

Small Victories by Anne Lamott

From the bestselling author of Stitches and Help, Thanks, Wow comes her long-awaited collection of new and selected essays on hope, joy, and grace.

Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It’s an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us—our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives. Lamott writes of forgiveness, restoration, and transformation, how we can turn toward love even in the most hopeless situations, how we find the joy in getting lost and our amazement in finally being found.

Profound and hilarious, honest and unexpected, the stories in Small Victories are proof that the human spirit is irrepressible.

Pages: 304
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (November 10, 2014)

The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss

Deep below the University, there is a dark place. Few people know of it: a broken web of ancient passageways and abandoned rooms. A young woman lives there, tucked among the sprawling tunnels of the Underthing, snug in the heart of this forgotten place.

Her name is Auri, and she is full of mysteries.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a brief, bittersweet glimpse of Auri’s life, a small adventure all her own. At once joyous and haunting, this story offers a chance to see the world through Auri’s eyes. And it gives the reader a chance to learn things that only Auri knows....

In this book, Patrick Rothfuss brings us into the world of one of The Kingkiller Chronicle’s most enigmatic characters. Full of secrets and mysteries, The Slow Regard of Silent Things is the story of a broken girl trying to live in a broken world.

Pages: 176
Publisher: DAW Hardcover (October 28, 2014)

How To Be a Husband by Tim Dowling

A riotously funny book about how to be a good husband (not like he would know) by Tim Dowling, star columnist for The Guardian. Think Nick Hornby meets Dave Barry—with a hint of Modern Family.
This is not a self-help book. Tim Dowling doesn’t have any solid advice for you on how to be a man—he tried hard to become one for a while, but in the end he just got older. This is simply the story of how, in the course of ten bewilderingly short years, Dowling went from a bachelor’s life in New York City to becoming an ex-pat in London, solidly married and the father of three young boys. It’s also an examination of what it means to be a husband in the twenty-first century—and what is and isn’t required to hold that office these days.

Tim Dowling has been exploiting his family in his writing for years, ever since it became clear that readers of his weekly column at The Guardian couldn’t get enough stories about his acerbically witty spouse and their rambunctious offspring. Dowling writes brilliantly about his wife and marriage, from the first days of their whirlwind courtship to the matter-of-fact way in which they decided to tie the knot, and keeping the “magic” alive after ten years together. Being a husband and father in the era of “The End of Men” isn’t easy, and Dowling continues to struggle to find ways to remain relevant to his family (hint: proficiency at DIY never hurts).

How to Be a Husband is a joyous and poignant read—a personal memoir about falling in love, moving to another country, having children, and staying together through money troubles and times of grief—that also just so happens to be devastatingly funny.

Pages: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press (February 5, 2015)