Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
"Pearl's job is to make people happy. Every day, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own...
Author
Language
English
Description
A few years from now, in a world similar to ours, there exists a sort of “depression plague” that people refer to simply as “The Grey.” No one can predict whom it will afflict, or how, but once infected, there’s no coming back. A young Hong Kong based scientist, Lily Barnes, is trying to maintain her inner light in an increasingly dark world. The human race is dwindling, and people fighting to push forward are increasingly rare. One day,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Isadora Bentley believes that happiness is something that flat-out doesn't exist in her life -- and never will. As a university researcher, Isadora keeps to herself as much as possible. She avoids the students she's supposed to befriend and mentor. She lives her own quiet, organized life in her own quiet, organized apartment. And she will never get involved in a romantic relationship again -- especially with another academic. It will be just Isadora...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Annie Hebden is stuck. Stuck in her boring job, with her irritating roommate, in a life no thirty-five-year-old would want. But deep down, Annie is still mourning the terrible loss that tore a hole through the perfect existence she'd once taken for granted--and hiding away is safer than remembering what used to be. Until she meets the eccentric Polly Leonard"--Amazon.com.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
It's 1994 and Adam, a drug addict from New York City, arrives at a kibbutz in Israel with a medieval sapphire brooch. To make up for a past crime, he needs to get the priceless heirloom to a woman his grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz fifty years earlier. There Adam joins other troubled people trying to turn their lives around: Ulya, the ambitious and beautiful Soviet emigre ; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
"The novel begins with the character of Ethan, a lawyer living in New York City who tells us the story of his family's life just as they learn his father - a textile manufacturer who spent long trips throughout Asia - has fathered a secret family from a woman he met on one of his trips and set up in a house in Queens. From here, we move to different related characters as the novel expands outward to the woman, her sons, a few surprise relations, some...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"In the Before, humankind is created with a hole in its heart, the designers not realizing their mistake - if it was a mistake - until too late.Elliot Chance is just a boy, and knows nothing of this. All he knows is that he doesn't feel at home in this world, and his desire for escape becomes more urgent as he grows into adulthood, where the turbulence of life seems to offer no cure for the emptiness. Desperate and lost, he stumbles upon a support...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A thirty-year-old woman retraces her gap year through Ireland, France, and Italy to find love-and herself-in this hilarious and heartfelt novel. It's been seven years since Chelsea Martin embarked on her year-long post-college European adventure. Since then, she's lost her mother to cancer and watched her sister marry twice, while Chelsea's thrown herself into work, becoming one of the most talented fundraisers for the American Cancer Coalition,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"First published in Japan in 2003 and never before published in the United States, Dead-End Memories collects the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, quietly discover their ways back to recovery. Among the women we meet in Dead-End Memories is one betrayed by her fiancé who finds a perfect refuge in an apartment above her uncle's bar while seeking the real meaning of happiness. In "House of Ghosts," the daughter of a yoshoku...
11) Happiness
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
A fox makes its way across London's Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide - Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech. In this delicate tale of love and loss, of cruelty and kindness, Aminatta Forna asks us to consider the interconnectedness of lives, our co-existence with one another and all living creatures, and the true nature of happiness....
13) Final spin
Author
Language
English
Description
"A powerful novel of brotherhood and the search for happiness from #1 New York Times bestselling author, Jocko Willink. Johnny is stuck-living at home and watching after his brother while working as a stock boy is not what he dreamed about. But when he and his best friend, Goat, see an opportunity to break free of the monotony and take care of Johnny's brother all in one shot, they jump on it. Now they're on the run and about to find out the price...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"A woman around her thirties begins to question the routine and predictability of her days. In everybody's eyes, she has a perfect life: a solid and stable marriage, a loving husband, sweet and well-behaved children and a job as a journalist she can't complain about. However, she can no longer bear the necessary effort to fake happiness when all she feels in life is an enormous apathy. All that changes when she encounters an ex-boyfriend from her...
Author
Language
English
Description
Adele and Justine have never been close. Born twenty years apart, Justine was already an adult when Addie was born. The sisters love each other but they don't really know each other. When Addie dropped out of university to care for their ailing parents, Justine, a successful lawyer, covered the expenses. It was the best arrangement at the time but now that their parents are gone, the future has changed dramatically for both women. Addie had great...
Author
Language
English
Description
This dark-comedic novel is about a woman, Janet, who wears a cloak of gloomy realism, until one summer when she learns of a new pill that offers even confirmed cynics a short-term taste of happiness. Her family stages an intervention, her boyfriend leaves her, and she decides to take the pill to get through the Christmas holiday. What follows is life-changing for all concerned, in ways no one expected. Janet works at a rundown dog shelter in the woods....
Author
Language
English
Description
A Timely Gift From the Author of Who Moved My Cheese?
Spencer Johnson, M.D.
Dr. Spencer Johnson’s stories of timeless, simple truths have changed the work and lives of millions of readers around the world. Now comes an insightful new tale of inspiration and practical guidance for these turbulent times.
The Present
The Present is the best gift you can receive because it makes you happy and successful!
Whether it means …
...
Spencer Johnson, M.D.
Dr. Spencer Johnson’s stories of timeless, simple truths have changed the work and lives of millions of readers around the world. Now comes an insightful new tale of inspiration and practical guidance for these turbulent times.
The Present
The Present is the best gift you can receive because it makes you happy and successful!
Whether it means …
...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"An unexpected friendship saves a young man's life in this moving, utterly charming debut about chosen family, the winding road to happiness, and the grace of second chances. Could I one day inspire happiness in others, the same way he seemed to do in me? It's 2005 and Harley has dropped out of college to move home, back to rural England where he works a dead-end job at a movie theater. Estranged from his father and finding every attempt at happiness...
Author
Language
English
Description
Hilarious, profound, and achingly true-to-life, Jonas Karlsson's new novel explores the true nature of happiness through the eyes of hero you won't soon forget. A passionate film buff, our hero's life revolves around his part-time job at a video store, the company of a few precious friends, and a daily routine that more often than not concludes with pizza and movie in his treasured small space in Stockholm. When he receives an astronomical invoice...
Author
Language
English
Description
Faith isn't so different from most women her age; She's thirty-two, single, has the requisite dysfunctional family, an even more dysfunctional best friend, a busy and challenging job, and in her weaker moments dreams of perhaps some day meeting a man that will ignite her senses and take her away from all this. The trouble is, while she aches to see the good in the world, Faith is constantly confronted by the bad. After having heard one too many love-gone-wrong...