We live in a world that demands relentless perfection. Happy marriages and easy friendships. Bucket list–level adventures and matching family photos. But what if our actual lives don’t feel very #blessed? Might our everyday existence be worthy of a blessing too? Even an average Tuesday?

Becky rocks a baby that rocked her world. Sixty years earlier, with her fiancé, Drew, in the middle of the Korean Conflict, Ivy throws herself into her work at a nursing home to keep her sanity and provide for the child Drew doesn't know is coming. Ivy cares for Anna, an elderly patient who taxes Ivy's listening ear until the day she suspects Anna's tall tales are not the ramblings of dementia. They're fragments of Anna's disjointed memories of a remarkable life.

Sasha Martin set herself a rather ambitious goal: to cook - and eat - her way around the world, with 196 recipes from196 countries in 196 weeks. Enter Global Table Adventure, a project that proves to be more than just a culinary challenge as Sasha attempts to navigate the vicissitudes of marriage, motherhood, and life's failures and successes, all inextricably linked to her troubled past.

More than 1.5 million copies sold! What if you discovered that the life you already have is the life you’ve always wanted? What if joy is possible right where you are? New York Times best-selling author Ann Voskamp invites you to embrace everyday blessings and embark on the transformative journey of chronicling God's gifts. How can you find joy in the midst of deadlines, debt, drama, and even the death of loved ones? What does the Christ-life really look like when your days are gritty, long, and sometimes even dark? How is God even here?

When her daughters are born deaf, Rosner is stunned. Then she discovers a hidden history of deafness in her family, going back generations to the Jewish enclaves of Eastern Europe. Traveling back in time, she imagines her silent relatives, who showed surprising creativity in dealing with a world that preferred to ignore them. Rosner shares her journey into the modern world of deafness, and the controversial decisions she and her husband have made about hearing aids, cochlear implants, and sign language.

Theodora is the matriarch of a family that, in her opinion, has grown into a bunch of truculent knuckleheads. They've all come together to South Carolina to celebrate Christmas. But this Christmas looks nothing like the extravagant, homey Christmases Theodora grew up with.

In 1945, Elsie Schmidt is a naive teenager, as eager for her first sip of champagne as she is for her first kiss. She and her family have been protected from the worst of the terror and desperation overtaking her country by a high-ranking Nazi who wishes to marry her. So when an escaped Jewish boy arrives on Elsie’s doorstep in the dead of night on Christmas Eve, Elsie understands that opening the door would put all she loves in danger.

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

Feelings of abandonment filled Helen at a too-young age when her mother died and her father walked out. Left in the care of her sister, Claire, she moved on, but never truly healed. Now thirty-five, married, and starting her own family, she must confront her inability to bear children by accepting the idea of adopting. But just when Helen experiences holding her new baby for the first time, she is blindsided with the worst possible news: Claire has cancer. Helen’s wounds are again torn open as she balances the delight of parenthood with the grief of her ailing sister.A poignant and probing exploration of life and loss, Daughters for a Time is a tale of unconditional love, the destructive and healing powers of family, and the search for solid ground between pain and joy.

In Barbara O’Neal’s novel of hope and renewal, two very different sisters discover that life is like a garden: Tend to it daily, nourish it with patience and optimism, and then watch the beauty unfold. After tragedy shatters her small community in Seattle, the Reverend Elsa Montgomery has a crisis of faith. Returning to her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, she seeks work in a local soup kitchen. Preparing nourishing meals for folks in need, she keeps her hands busy while her heart searches for understanding. Meanwhile, her sister, Tamsin, as colorful as Elsa is unadorned and steadfast, finds her perfect life shattered when she learns that her husband is a criminal.

One moment Ben Miller was high up in the rafters at his neighbor's barn raising. The next his foot slipped, and he plunged to his death, leaving behind a young wife and six children - the youngest born four months after his death. Ruth Miller is not alone. Her Amish neighbors help her to make the difficult transition from wife to widow. But while the community has been generous, raising six growing children, all grieving their father's death, is overwhelming.

At 28, Jessica Fechtor was happily immersed in graduate school and her young marriage and thinking about starting a family. Then one day she went for a run, and an aneurysm burst in her brain. She nearly died. She lost her sense of smell and the sight in her left eye and was forced to the sidelines of the life she loved. Jessica's journey to recovery began in the kitchen as soon as she was able to stand at the stovetop and stir. There, she drew strength from the restorative power of cooking and baking.

Told in multiple viewpoints, A Tangle of Knots is a magnificent puzzle. In a slightly magical world where everyone has a Talent, 11-year-old Cady is an orphan with a phenomenal Talent for cake baking. But little does she know that fate has set her on a journey from the moment she was born. And her destiny leads her to a mysterious address that houses a lost luggage emporium, an old recipe, a family of children searching for their own Talents, and a Talent Thief who will alter her life forever. However, these encounters hold the key to Cady's past and how she became an orphan.

Conceived in love and possibility, Bonaventure Arrow didn't make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead. No one knows that Bonaventure's silence is filled with resonance - a miraculous gift of rarified hearing that encompasses the Universe of Every Single Sound.

When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad's leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can't bear children, but as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.

Theodora is the matriarch of a family that, in her opinion, has grown into a bunch of truculent knuckleheads. They've all come together to South Carolina to celebrate Christmas. But this Christmas looks nothing like the extravagant, homey Christmases Theodora grew up with.

In 1945, Elsie Schmidt is a naive teenager, as eager for her first sip of champagne as she is for her first kiss. She and her family have been protected from the worst of the terror and desperation overtaking her country by a high-ranking Nazi who wishes to marry her. So when an escaped Jewish boy arrives on Elsie’s doorstep in the dead of night on Christmas Eve, Elsie understands that opening the door would put all she loves in danger.

In Barbara O’Neal’s novel of hope and renewal, two very different sisters discover that life is like a garden: Tend to it daily, nourish it with patience and optimism, and then watch the beauty unfold. After tragedy shatters her small community in Seattle, the Reverend Elsa Montgomery has a crisis of faith. Returning to her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, she seeks work in a local soup kitchen. Preparing nourishing meals for folks in need, she keeps her hands busy while her heart searches for understanding. Meanwhile, her sister, Tamsin, as colorful as Elsa is unadorned and steadfast, finds her perfect life shattered when she learns that her husband is a criminal.

At 28, Jessica Fechtor was happily immersed in graduate school and her young marriage and thinking about starting a family. Then one day she went for a run, and an aneurysm burst in her brain. She nearly died. She lost her sense of smell and the sight in her left eye and was forced to the sidelines of the life she loved. Jessica's journey to recovery began in the kitchen as soon as she was able to stand at the stovetop and stir. There, she drew strength from the restorative power of cooking and baking.

Angela can feel the clock ticking. She is single in New York City, stuck in a job she doesn't want and a life that seems to have somehow just happened. She inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, but she never seems to have the time for it - these days, her oven holds only sweaters. Tacked to her office bulletin board is a photo from a magazine of a tidy cottage on the coast of Maine - a charming reminder of a life that could be hers if she could only muster the courage to go after it.

When Rose Kurtz first arrived in Joel Dienner's home four years ago, the Amish widower had been completely grief-stricken by the shocking loss of his wife during childbirth. At the recommendation of the bishop, Joel's father, Rose is asked to become his bride and take care of his two small children and newborn baby, nestled in the tiny Amish community of Forest Hill in the eastern Appalachian Mountains, far from Rose's home.

Reminiscing about the people and events that shaped him, David looks back at the highs and lows of his life, from his rejection of being gay and his attempt to "turn straight" through Aesthetic Realism, a cult in downtown Manhattan, to becoming a writer, cookbook author, and web publisher, to his 23-year relationship with Alan, known to millions of David's readers and listeners as "The One", which began with (what else?) food.

Midwife Kim Osterholzer ushers listeners behind the doors of Amish homes as she recounts her adventures answering God's call to the craft of midwifery. Kim chronicles her nine-year apprenticeship grappling with the nuances and idiosyncrasies of homebirth. She recounts the beauty and painstaking effort of those early years spent catching babies by the light of crackling woodstoves, oil lamps, and lanterns. Every birth enthralled her, whether it involved halting hemorrhages, sharing breath with tiny lungs, or bouncing through wild rides in ambulances.

More than 1.5 million copies sold! What if you discovered that the life you already have is the life you’ve always wanted? What if joy is possible right where you are? New York Times best-selling author Ann Voskamp invites you to embrace everyday blessings and embark on the transformative journey of chronicling God's gifts. How can you find joy in the midst of deadlines, debt, drama, and even the death of loved ones? What does the Christ-life really look like when your days are gritty, long, and sometimes even dark? How is God even here?

Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender.

Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.

Far too young to be a widow, Angelina D’Angelo suddenly finds herself facing a life without her beloved husband, Frank. Late one night shortly after the funeral, she makes her way down to the kitchen and pours all of her grief and anger into the only outlet she has left - her passion for cooking.

Truly Plaice, an overly large and ungainly girl, is the polar opposite of her sister, Serena Jane, the epitome of feminine perfection. With their parents dead, Truly and Serena Jane are separated: Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation.

Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with 37 acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood - his city-bred parents took in more than 100 foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm - for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.

Maddy is a social worker trying to balance her career and three children. Years ago, she fell in love with Ben, a public defender, drawn to his fiery passion, but now he's lashing out at her during his periodic verbal furies. She vacillates between tiptoeing around him and asserting herself for the sake of their kids - which works to keep a fragile peace - until the rainy day when they're together in the car and Ben's volatile temper gets the best of him, leaving Maddy in the hospital fighting for her life.