This Life Is in Your Hands — Melissa Coleman

With echoes of the bestselling memoirs Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and The Liars' Club, Melissa Coleman's This Life Is in Your Hands tells the true story of a childhood burned in memory not only because it was tragic, but because it was magical, too. This is a book for our troubled but hopeful times — a memoir about the yearning for a simple, unencumbered life and the unraveling that comes from the single-minded pursuit of a dream. And it is a book that introduces a superb young writer who will move you with her evocation of a lost time and place and touch you with her willingness to expose her heart, broken open by the search for the truth.

With subtle insight and an ear for the sensual rhythms of nature, Coleman tells the story of her parents, Eliot and Sue — a handsome, idealistic young couple from proper New England families who leave behind the trappings and expectations of their blue-blood existence to forge a self-sustaining life on the rugged coast of Maine. Disciples of Scott and Helen Nearing, champions of the back to the land movement, the Colemans lay down $2,000 for sixty rocky, unyielding acres, build a cabin for $680 more, and set to work with only the crudest tools, the strength of their own hands, and the determination to create a utopia in which to raise their family and live a life in partnership with nature.

Sue bears three beautiful girls, Melissa and her sisters Heidi and Clara, and together the Colemans build upon their purist vision. They eat what they grow, live a life of simple abundance, and create a community that draws fellow seekers, students, and even a reporter from The Wall Street Journal who visits the farm to tell the family's unusual story. But the pursuit of a grand vision comes at a price. The winters are unforgiving and relentless, the isolation unnerving, and the young apprentices who travel from nearby colleges to farm the land introduce temptation and despair into the Coleman's marriage. And then, one summer day when Melissa is seven, three-year-old Heidi wanders off into the humid afternoon, disappearing into the black water of the irrigation pond they built to sustain their crops. An angelic daughter has drowned, another has survived. What really happened at the edge of those waters and who, if anyone, is to blame?

What follows is the stuff of all-too-human frailty, and ultimately the survival of the tragedy's other victim, young Melissa, in the end left deserted on the farm with only the apprentices to look after her, haunted by the need to uncover the truth of her sister's death and pull from the wreckage the beauty of a dream unfulfilled.

As a freelance writer, Melissa Coleman has covered health, food, gardening, art and travel for magazines and newspapers including The Oregonian, Rocky Mountain Magazine and Delicious Living. She has studied writing with Tom Perrotta (Little Children), Michael Lowenthal (Charity Girl) and Tom Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon). Melissa lives in Freeport, Maine with her husband, Eric, and twin daughters, Heidi and Emily.

To be published by HarperCollins in April, 2011.

To The Last Breath — Dr. Francis Slakey

Dr. Francis Slakey's To The Last Breath is the fascinating memoir of a revered scientist's extraordinary personal quest to summit the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean — and how this daunting pursuit not only tested the limits of his physical being, but challenged his long-held intellectual and scientific beliefs and inspired a new understanding of human interdependence.

A gripping adventure of the body and the mind, To The Last Breath is fuelled by superb adventure writing and expanded by riveting science and arresting insight into our relation to the earth and to each other. With echoes of the international bestsellers Into Thin Air and Three Cups of Tea, Dr. Slakey's narrative offers an accessible exploration of the physics and spirit of interconnection.

From an encounter with a Lama who gifts him with a rare and mysterious amulet; to life and death choices of conscience and self-preservation on the treacherous, icy peaks of the world's most awe-inspiring mountains; to an ambush at gunpoint in Indonesia; to falling in love on Everest with the woman who would become his wife, To The Last Breath demonstrates one man's transformation from a single-minded, fiercely rational scientist to a passionate intellect who faces the unknowable power of existence — beyond the grip of the rational mind.

Dr. Francis Slakey is the Upjohn Lecturer on Physics and Public Policy at Georgetown University whose focus is the intersection of science and society. The co-director of the Program on Science in the Public Interest, a Lemelson Associate of the Smithsonian Institution and a MacArthur Scholar, Dr. Slakey has been profiled by NPR, National Geographic and others, and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, and Scientific American.

To be published by Simon & Schuster in 2011.