“Tender Love” by Juliette Duncan

Tessa Scott is a veterinarian in her 20s who is trying to get over a broken relationship. Her housemate Stephanie is an intern at a Christian counseling agency, and she has a tendency to talk too much about her clients. 

One of those clients is Ben Williams, an accountant in his mid-30s and the father of a 13-year-old boy. Ben is trying to work through his own broken relationship – more than a year before, his wife walked out on him and their son and filed for divorce. She had found what she’d been looking for along in a tournament golf professional. 

Ben and Tessa meet at dog training classes, and they both attracted to each other. But Tessa realizes right away she already knows too much about Ben and his problems from Stephanie. Ben is wary of beginning any kind of relationship. And his son Jayden is just as troubled by his mother’s abandonment as Ben is.

Juliette Duncan

Set in Brisbane, Australia, Tender Love by Juliette Duncan is the story of how Tessa and Ben gradually feel their way through brokenness and uncertainty. Past experiences lead both to doubt their ability to sustain a new relationship, and the story turns on whether or not their faith can enable them to overcome doubts and reach toward each other.

Duncan is the author of numerous inspirational Christian romances, many set within series. Tender Love is the first of six in the “True Love” series, which involves many of the same characters over a period of time. The author lives in Brisbane.

Tender Love is a quiet, simple story of two broken people who discover they don’t have to be mended to love again.

Saroo Brierly’s “A Long Way Home”

Sheru was a five-year-old boy helping his family live by their wits in a small town in north central India. His father was a Muslim, and had left the family to marry a second wife. His mother was a Hindu, struggling to raise three boys and a girl. Sheru was the youngest of the three boys. He couldn’t quite pronounce his name correctly and so called himself “Saroo.” He had one significant responsibility, other than begging for food and sometimes stealing it: taking care of his little sister while his mother worked carting rocks for a construction crew. His mother would often be gone for three or four days at a time for her job.

His older brothers worked, begged, and sometimes stole as well. In search of work, they would often sneak aboard trains to travel to the next town or two down the line. One day, Saroo’s oldest brother took Saroo with him. The little boy was thrilled to go along. When they arrived, his brother tells Saroo to wait at the train station until he returns. He falls asleep on a bench. When he awakens, the station is deserted, and there is no sign of his brother. A train arrives, and the little boy gets in and looks for his brother. He discovers the train car is empty, with barred windows and doors that open only from the outside. And then the train begins to move.

A Long Way Home is Saroo Brierly’s remarkable and true story of what happened when he boarded that train. The train traveled across India to Calcutta (now called Kolkata). And the five-year-old boy found himself in one of the largest, most densely populated, and most dangerous cities in the world. With only two fragments of information about where his family lived, Saroo would live on the streets of Calcutta for six months, avoid police, child molesters, gangs preying on orphaned and abandoned children, and an always-constant hunger for food.

Saroo was eventually befriended by a teenager, taken to the police station, confined to a juvenile facility (along with children like himself, young criminals, and children needing medical care), and then adopted by a couple in Tasmania, the island off the southern coast of Australia. And there he lived, with a bedroom larger than the room his family in India shared and with a real bed, until he reached adulthood and began working with his adopted father in the family business.

Saroo Brierly

With the advent of the internet and especially Google Earth, he begins to search for his family in India. It takes years, but the recognition of a water tower in a small town begins the journey home, a journey that ends in finding his birth family. The house they had lived in was abandoned and crumbling, but his mother lived nearby. She insisted on staying near where they had lived because she believed her youngest son would one day come home. And he did.

Saroo’s story is a story of desperate and unimaginable poverty, what people do to survive, the love of two families in radically different circumstances, and the determination of a young man to find out what had happened to his brother and his family after that train began to move.

The book had been made into a movie, Lion, starring Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) and Nicole Kidman. It is scheduled for release in U.S. movie theaters on Nov. 25.

Top photograph: a scene from the movie “Lion,” based on A Long Way Home.

Mark Twain: "Chasing the Last Laugh" by Richard Zacks

The Panic of 1893 began with European banks worrying about a coup and wheat crop failure in Argentina. Within a very short period of time, the panic had spread to the United States, and a severe depression began. Stock prices collapsed, more than 500 U.S. banks closed, farms were abandoned, and more than 15,000 businesses failed. The effects didn’t occur overnight, but they happened fairly rapidly.

One of the businesses that eventually failed was the Charles Webster publishing firm. It was owned by Mark Twain. Twain desperately sought to keep the business afloat, while at the same time investing heavily in a linotype machine that would have brought a fortune had it worked. It didn’t. Twain and his family lost nearly everything and he was left heavily in debt, a debt his wife insisted that he pay.

As popular historian recounts in Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour, Twain did the only thing he knew to do, the thing he had come to intensely dislike. He went on the lecture circuit. In fact, he went on the global lecture circuit.

The itinerary took Twain, his wife Livy, and their daughter Clara (two other daughters stayed in New York) first across the northern United States to Seattle, and by boat to the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, South Africa, and then England. The trip took close to a full year: Twain spoke hundreds of times, occasionally to half-filled auditoriums but more often to houses so packed that extra engagements had to be scheduled.

The tour was a moneymaking event, to be sure, but it became something of a triumph for Twain the writer and speaker and Twain the man.

The tour has always been covered in other biographies, but not to the detail Zacks includes. And the story is in both the overview and the details – the overlay of late 19^th century imperialism, the British Raj in India reaching its apogee, the stark realities of race in South Africa, the responses of the audiences, the specific stories Twain told at each of the performances, how the newspapers covered him and his stories, what played well, and what didn’t.

This could get tedious, but in Zacks’ hands it becomes rich and illuminating. He tells a wonderful story, pulling from the correspondence of Twain, the family, friends and relatives, and robber baron H.H. Rogers, who did more than anyone else (including Twain) to extricate the author from his legal and financial ordeals.

Richard Zacks

Zacks is the author of a number popular histories, including History Laid Bare (1995); An Underground Education (1999); The Pirate Hunter (2003); The Pirate Coast (2006); and Island of Vice (2012). He’s also been a freelance journalist, writing for such publications as The Atlantic and ESPN.

Chasing the Last Laugh is a fascinating account of a major American author who stared financial (and social) ruin in the face, and ultimately didn’t blink. And managed to entertain a lot of people along the way.

Top photograph: The frontispiece of Following the Equator, the book Twain wrote after he concluded his around-the-world speaking tour.