We’re not promising these books will make you lucky in love. Just Lucky Stars in love. They are completely swoon-worthy. If you have not yet discovered writers like Larry Brown or Carrie Brown, Shirley Abbott or “Gingy” Beckerman, Christopher Castellani or Jon Michaud, now is the time. Fall for their silky smooth writing, their unforgettable characters, their universal stories. And all for just $1.99 throughout February!  Our Valentine to you…

 What We Do For Love by Ilene Beckerman: Looking for love isn’t easy, and it’s never what you expect. In What We Do For Love, Ilene (“Gingy”) Beckerman tells her funny, sometimes heartbreaking story, a story that every woman who’s ever searched for love will recognize. The first crush. The phone call that doesn’t come. The makeovers after the breakups. And the exchange of marriage vows.

With poignant prose and drawings, Beckerman looks back on a lifetime of trying to find true love. She remembers sneaking out of the house to neck with her high school boyfriend, dancing cheek-to-cheek with her first husband, and settling down with her second husband — but even he is not the man of her dreams. Through it all, Gingy Beckerman holds on to the possibility that there might be someone out there who’s just right for her. And, as it turns out, there is — “I never would have expected when I was a senior in high school that I wouldn’t find love until I was practically a senior citizen.”

What We Do For Love is a moving, humorous reminder that when it comes to love almost anything is possible.

You can buy the What We Do For Love e-book for $1.99 throughout February. 

 Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown: Lamb in Love is set in a rural English village the year of the Apollo moon landing and tells of two people surprised, halfway through their lives by . . . what? Passion? Desire? Love? They haven’t the experience to quite identify it. Norris and Vida have known each other forever. Neither has had any idea how to go about falling in love. Vida Stephen has been nanny for twenty years to the mentally handicapped son of a rich American widower. Every day for most of her life, she nods to Norris Lamb, the postmaster, when calling for her mail. Sometimes Norris offers pretty stamps to the boy. A fussy, stamp-collecting bachelor and church organist, Norris has fallen suddenly, amazingly, and secretly in love with Vida. Witness to Norris and Vida’s halting, at times embarrassing courtship is Vida’s charge, Manford – mute and clumsy and yet possessed of an odd and gentle intelligence. It is through Manford, even thanks to him, that Norris and Vida finally come to recognize each other and themselves.

Carrie Brown has an affinity for the way love transforms the most ordinary and imperfect people. In Lamb in Love, she celebrates a man and a woman who discover in themselves a bravery that allows them to become the heroes of their own story.

You can buy the Lamb in Love e-book for $1.99 throughout February.

 When Tito Loved Clara by Jon Michaud: Clara Lugo grew up in a home that would have rattled the most grounded of children. Through brains and determination, she has long since slipped the bonds of her confining Dominican neighborhood in the northern reaches of Manhattan. Now she tries to live a settled professional life with her American husband and son in the suburbs of New Jersey — often thwarted by her constellation of relatives who don’t understand her gringa ways.

Her mostly happy life is disrupted, however, when Tito, a former boyfriend from fifteen years earlier, reappears. Something has impeded his passage into adulthood. His mother calls him an Unfinished Man. He still carries a torch for Clara; and she harbors a secret from their past. Their reacquaintance sets in motion an unraveling of both of their lives and reveals what the cost of assimilation — or the absence of it — has meant for each of them. This immensely entertaining novel — filled with wit and compassion — marks the debut of a fine writer.

You can buy the When Tito Loved Clara e-book for $1.99 throughout February. 

All This Talk of Love by Christopher Castellani: It’s been fifty years since Antonio Grasso married Maddalena and brought her to America. That was the last time she saw her parents, her sisters and brothers — everything she knew and loved in the village of Santa Cecilia, Italy. Maddalena sees no need to open the door to the past and let the emotional baggage and unmended rifts of another life spill out.

But Prima was raised on the lore of the Old Country. And as she sees her parents aging, she hatches the idea to take the entire family back to Italy — hoping to reunite Maddalena with her estranged sister and let her parents see their homeland one last time. It is an idea that threatens to tear the Grasso family apart, until fate deals them some unwelcome surprises, and their trip home becomes a necessary journey.

All This Talk of Love is an incandescent novel about sacrifice and hope, loss and love, myth and memory.

You can buy the All This Talk of Love e-book for $1.99 throughout February. 

My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams: Sheila Kay Adams brings us a novel inspired by the ballads of the English, Scottish, and Irish. These long, sad stories of heartbreak and betrayal, violence and love, have been sung for generations by the descendents of those who settled the Appalachian mountains in the 1700s. As they raised their children, they taught them first to sing, for the songs told the children everything they needed to know about life.

So it was with the Stanton family living in Marshall, North Carolina, during the 1800s. Even Larkin Stanton, just a baby when his parents die and he’s taken in by his cousin Arty, starts humming before he starts talking. As he grows up, he hungrily learns every song he can, and goes head-to-head with his cousin Hackley for the best voice, and, of course, the best attentions of the women. It’s not long before the two boys find themselves pursuing the affections of the same lovely girl, Mary, who eventually chooses Hackley for her husband.

But, just as in the most tragic ballads, there is no stowing away of emotions. And when Hackley leaves his wife under his cousin’s care in the midst of the Civil War, Larkin finds himself drawn back to the woman who’s held his heart for years. What he does about that love defies all his learning of family and loyalty and reminds us that those mournful ballads didn’t just come from the imagination, but from the imperfections of the heart.

You can buy the My Old True Love e-book for $1.99 throughout February. 

The Future of Love by Shirley Abbott: Love can be a happy affair or a source of impenetrable sadness. For eight New Yorkers, the love they find is never what they expect. Shirley Abbott brilliantly dissects those tangled relationships. And what a messy knot it is: Maggie loves her husband, Mark, but wishes he weren’t unemployed. Mark has little to do these days but rendezvous with his lover, Sophie. That she happens to be his daughter’s nursery school teacher is unfortunate. Maggie is also in the dark about her recently widowed mother’s affair with Sam, a famous publisher. Sam’s wife, Edith, is more concerned about derailing for her granddaughter’s commitment ceremony. Edith doesn’t believe in same-sex love; well, according to Sam, Edith doesn’t believe in sex at all. Which may be why Sam is spending so much time at Antonia’s Greenwich Village apartment. . . .

As the ground under them is literally shaken in September of 2001, each member of this urban ensemble will have to rethink his or her complicated domestic arrangements — and begin to look at the future in new ways. Abbott’s language is so immediate, her characters are so authentic, that she is able to render the perplexities of ordinary life with profound and surprising power. A contemporary Edith Wharton, she writes with humor and empathy about men and women looking for connection, for love, for understanding, and she allows us to see the possibility of happiness even as tomorrow looms uncertain. The Future of Love, the first novel from a widely praised memoirist, reconfirms why reviewers have called her work “lyrical,” “wise,” “witty,” “powerful,” “mesmerizing,” and, simply, “a genuine pleasure to read.”

You can buy the The Future of Love e-book for $1.99 throughout February. 

Big Bad Love by Larry Brown: Larry Brown first caught the rapt attention of readers and critics with the 1988 publication of  his prize-winning collection, Facing the Music, and he kept that attention in book after book before his untimely death in 2004. Big Bad Love, his third book, collects ten stories dealing with sex, with drink, with fear, with all kinds of bad luck and obsession. These stories are unflinching and not for the fainthearted or the easily shocked.

But as is true of all of Brown’s fiction, these ten stories are linked in a collective statement of redemption and hope, a statement here illuminated by the obsession that sets man apart from beast — the drive to communicate.

Here are ten stories and ten heroes — heroes who share many of the same characteristics, though not exactly the same name. Here are Leo, Lonnie, Leroy, Louis, Mr. Lawrence, Leon . . . some even have the initials LB. All ten live in rural Mississippi. They like to drive around the back roads in pickup trucks with coolers of beer close at hand. Their marriages aren’t ideal. They frequent local bars. They are men of few words driven to express themselves. Nine of the stories are irreverent, brutal, and funny. In the tenth story, one difference sets its hero apart. He is a writer. His story is also irreverent and brutal, but it is not quiet so funny. Instead, it is as close to the truth as human expression can take us.

You can buy the Big Bad Love for $1.99 throughout February