Filled with soulful humor and quiet pathos, Abby Bardi's boldly drawn first novel marks the debut of a joyfully talented chronicler of the quest for connection in contemporary life. Mary Fred Anderson, raised in an isolated fundamentalist sect whose primary obsessions seem to involve an imminent Apocalypse and the propagation of the name "Fred," is hardly your average fifteen-year-old. She has never watched TV, been to a supermarket, or even read much of anything beyond the inscrutable dogma laid out by the prophet Fred. But this is all before Mary Fred's whole world tilts irrevocably on its axis: before her brothers, Fred and Freddie, take sick and pass on to the place the Reverend Thigpen calls "the World Beyond"; before Mama and Papa are escorted from the Fredian Outpost in police vans; and Mary Fred herself is uprooted and placed in foster care with the Cullison family. It is here, at Alice Cullison's suburban home outside Washington, D.C.,...

All those people - were any of them who they seemed? Set in Chicago, 1975, Double-take is the story of artsy Rachel Cochrane, who returns from college with no job and confronts the recent death of Bando, one of her best friends. When she runs into Joey, a mutual friend, their conversations take them back into their shared past and to the revelation that Bando may have been murdered. To find out who murdered him, Rachel is forced to revisit her stormy 1960s adolescence, a journey that brings her into contact with her old friends, her old self, and danger. Surprising and haunting, this is an insightful reminiscence of a time of naivety, danger and renewal. PRAISE FOR ABBY BARDI 'Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers Australia for the opportunity to read and review this book [THE SECRET LETTERS]' Elizabeth, Netgalley 'You'll like this book [THE SECRET LETTERS] if: The thrill of the chase is something you enjoy, followed by a hugely surprising twist!' Pam, Netgalley 'I...

A moving family story for fans of Liane Moriarty and Anne Tyler. When Julie's mother dies, her sister Pam finds a cache of old letters from her mother's former lover. Julie does the math and concludes that the letters' author was her real father, a Native American man named J. Fallingwater. With her inheritance, Julie opens a restaurant named after her father and it's an immediate success. But when tragedy strikes, Julie, Pam, and their weird siblings have to pull together as a family, and in the process, Julie solves the mystery of J. Fallingwater's identity.