"A celebration of the joy and comfort to be found in alone time and the joy and comfort that a friend can bring"--

For years, rumors of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So, in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to...

Elizabeth and Jackson Shore married young, raised two daughters, and weathered the storms of youth as they built a future together. But after the children leave home, they quietly drift apart. When Jack accepts a new job across country Elizabeth follows. The sudden death of her father changes everything. Grieving and alone, she retreats to an isolated beach house where she packs away the last remnants of her parents' lives. She sees their tender story...

Seth is a teenage deckhand on his father's boat when he and his dog are washed overboard and swept to one of Alaska's small islands where they struggle for months to survive off land and sea, while his desperate father endures his own emotional journey and never gives up hope.

"A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies--her first in nearly a decade. Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant:...

Henry David Thoreau built his small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845. For the next two years he lived there as simply as possible, seeking "the essential facts of life" and learning to eliminate the unnecessary details-material and spiritual-that intrude upon our happiness. He described his experiences in Walden, using vivid, forceful prose that transforms his reflections on nature into richly evocative metaphors to live by. George Eliot's...

Though playing with a friend can be a great deal of fun, it's good to be alone sometimes too.

By 1952, Thomas Merton's renown as the bestselling author of The Seven Storey Mountain was well established. During the years illuminated by this third volume of his private journals, Merton struggled to reconcile his celebrity with his desire for a life of hermetic silence and contemplation. Already at the Abbey of Gethsemani for over a decade, Merton was beginning to grow impatient with the strictures and shortcomings of conventional monastic life....

From the publisher. Walden is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of his experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth, and above all the freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him. This new edition traces the sources of Thoreau's reading and thinking and considers the author in the context of his birthplace and sense of history -- social, economic, and...