Reading Recommendations: Grace, a Novel, Richard Paul Evans.

"Dear Reader,

My readers often ask where my stories come from. I'm not always sure. Sometimes a story just comes to me in waves (or trickles) of inspiration and often times its not until the very end of the book that I see where my characters are taking me. This is such a tale.

Grace is the story of a young runaway girl and the boy who hides her from a frightening world too large and unfathomable for him to comprehend. It is also about two brothers and the love that binds them together through difficult times.

In some ways this is the most autobiographical of all my novels. When I was eight years old, my father lost his job, and we sold our home in beautiful and aptly named Arcadia, California, to move to a poor neighborhood in Utah and into a rundown home like the one I describe in the story. I have no fond memories of that time. Not one. I want to go home.

I've found my home now, and it has nothing to do with the place where I live, and everything to do with the family I love." Sincerely, RPE.

One of my most favorite writers-Richard Paul Evans is always remembered as the author of The Christmas Box and The Gift.

And, 1960 LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon, The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies, David Pietrusza.

Round one of 1960's electrifying presidential contest matched charismatic John F. Kennedy's blend of Harvard eloquence and dashing vigor against senate power broker Lyndon Johnson's mercurial mix of Texas bluster and maddening indecision, the cool patrician versus the manic cowboy. Round two pitted JFK, dashing yet flawed in ways carefully hidden from an adoring public, against lone wolf Richard Nixon, brooding, ultimately damned in his quest for political power and personal validation. Nixon versus Kennedy: Uriah Heep versus Dorian Gray.

Like The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White, yet far more revealing than Kennedy camp insider White could ever be, David Pietrusza's 1960 chronicles a campaign year that looms ever larger in American history. The year marked the twilight of back room politics as epitomized by Kennedy's multimillionaire father , Joseph, and the dawn of a political order in which the presidential primaries rose from virtual irrelevance to an indispensable testing ground of a candidate's electability. It also betokened an era in which television, beginning with the Nixon-Kennedy debates, would increasingly carry the message of the candidates.

With a cast of many important supporting characters, 1960 has the narrative energy and suspenseful twists and turns of a headlong thriller. Yet its all true. America changed forever in 1960, and 1960 will change the way you think about America. Unforgettable!

And, The Letters, a Novel by Luanne Rice and Joseph Monninger.

In this remarkable collaboration Luanne Rice and Joseph Monninger combine their unique talents to create, through a series of searching, intimate letters, a powerfully moving novel of an estranged husband and wife. By way of a correspondence so achingly real you'll forget its fiction, they trace the history of a love affair and of a family before and after, the moment that changed the course of two people's journey forever.

Sam and Hadley West are both trying in their own ways to survive after the unthinkable loss of their only son in Alaska. For Sam, a sports journalist, acceptance means an arduous trek by dogsled across the bleak and beautiful arctic wilderness to find the place where Paul died. For Hadley, it means renting a benignly haunted, salt soaked cottage off the Maine coast, where she begins to paint again.

Now, at opposite ends of the country, waiting for their divorce to be final, they begin to exchange letters by post, missive's filled with longing and truths they never voiced, as they recall their marriage, its magic moments and its challenges, and begin to rediscover the reason's they fell in love in the first place.

As Sam risks his life to reach the remote crash site, Hadley begins an equally hazardous inner journey to a rendezvous with the mad grief of a mother's heart. At the place where all else is lost, they will meet again-Unforgettable!

See you at Rylander!