The year is 1338 and England is in a time of peril as raiders pillage the land and, with no one to challenge them, their actions begin to grow like wildfire. At the height of their terror, eight year old Isadora watches her mother and sister be raped and murdered by an army of mercenaries before her village is scorched to the ground. Promising to avenge her family, Izzie grows up to become the most feared warrior in the country. * * * 10 years later and a new King sits on the throne. The raiders have scattered to the east and peace seems to have returned to England but it is short lived as a new evil has come to England. A horrible disease starts to plague the country and the king orders villages to be purged as sacrifices to appease the Lord. Now, Izzie is called upon to help the King's subjects survive his soldiers with her unique set of skills. But the warrior with no alligences may just discover something so dreadful that could change her view on King, God and Country forever.

My grandfather never learned the days of the week. Every Friday, he would ask a passing schoolchild what day it was. If they said Friday, he would go buy meat - and then walk to the slope at the edge of our village to wait for me. This is a memoir about him, about my grandmother, and about a rural village in Hubei, China that is slowly disappearing. It is about the children who were left behind, the elders who carried a century of history in their mouths, and the ordinary days that turned out not to be ordinary at all. Crossroads began as something I wrote for my grandfather who was still alive. It became something I am giving to one who is not.

A wealthy young Black girl from Cape Town, gifted at both fashion design and building things with her hands, leaves South Africa at sixteen to study architecture in London. To pay her way, she starts a fashion label on the side, working nights on a sewing machine and days on architectural drawings. A chance renovation project gives her her first real break, and she spends the following decades reinvesting everything she earns until she's built a hundred-acre family compound outside London, proof that a girl once told her ambitions were too big for her had built them true anyway.