Life & Style

Treat Yourself!

You’ve hosted Thanksgiving and attended a dozen holiday parties. You’ve baked and shopped, chopped and sauteed, knitted and crocheted your way through the holidays. Today, we invite you to TREAT YOURSELF!

Through December 31, Algonquin’s Lucky Stars is holding a holiday ebook bonanza—48 exciting novels, scintillating short stories, inspiring memoirs and biographies are just $3.99 or less. What better treat for the tireless chef, crafter, and gift-maker than a mini-vacation in a new ebook? Here are just 4 of the included titles:

A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi – $1.99

Fernando first sees Marlena across the Piazza San Marco and falls in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; she, a divorced American chef traveling through Italy, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thought she was done with romantic love, incapable of intimacy. Yet within months of their first meeting, she has quit her job, sold her house in St. Louis, kissed her two grown sons good-bye, and moved to Venice to marry “the stranger,” as she calls Fernando.

This deliciously satisfying memoir is filled with the foods and flavors of Italy and peppered with culinary observations and recipes. But the main course here is an enchanting true story about a woman who falls in love with both a man and a city, and finally finds the home she didn’t even know she was missing.

Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt – $3.99

In 1956, Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a desirable Boston suburb. Ava is beautiful, divorced, Jewish, and a working mom. She finds her neighbors less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood—in the throes of Cold War paranoia—seizes the opportunity to further ostracize Ava and her son.

Years later, when Lewis and Rose reunite to untangle the final pieces of the tragic puzzle, they must decide: Should you tell the truth even if it hurts those you love, or should some secrets remain buried?

When Angels Sing by Turk Pippin – $3.99

This classic Christmas story of rekindled spirit is the inspiration behind the 2013 holiday film Angels Sing, starring Harry Connick Jr., Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Lyle Lovett.

This is the tale of Michael, who was eight years old on the Christmas Day he lost his brother David. The day had started out well–Michael and David opened their presents, and much to their delight, they had both received ice skates from Santa. With great excitement they set out to the pond behind their grandparents’ house in New Mexico to try them out. But the pond wasn’t safe, and David didn’t make it out of its icy cold depths. For Michael, the meaning of Christmas changed forever that day.

Thirty years later Michael is the neighborhood Grinch. “To me the only wonder of Christmas is not why that tragedy marked me so,” Michael says, “but how the rest of my family can seem so completely unscathed.” He scowls at his neighbors’ fervent holiday traditions and at his own children, who want nothing more than to string Christmas lights through their front yard. But when another holiday disaster strikes and his own cherished young son loses his spirit to live, Michael searches deep within himself to root out the anger, the fear, and the pain of the past. Can he bear to remember exactly what happened that Christmas Day? And will he make peace with this past for the sake of his own children?

The Third Son by Julie Wu – $3.99

In the middle of a terrifying air raid in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, Saburo, the least favored son of a Taiwanese politician, runs through a peach forest for cover. It’s there he stumbles on Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise. Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival. In Saburo, author Julie Wu has created an extraordinary character who is determined to fight for everything he needs and wants, from food to education to his first love.

A sparkling and moving story, it will have readers cheering for a young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.

Find out more about Algonquin’s Lucky Stars here and snag that great book you’ve been dying to read all year—for under $4.

Go ahead. You deserve it!

P.S. Did you know that your local independent bookstore sells ebooks? You can take advantage of these deals and support your local store by purchasing ebooks through Kobo here.