Number one best-seller Jane Green - author of The Beach House and Spellbound - explores changes in relationships when a family member is struck with illness in her heartbreaking novel The Love Verb . Love means being there - through everything. Everyone in Callie's family is busy; her sister is a free-spirited Manhattan chef, her best friend Lila is coping with the vitriol of her new man's ex-wife, and her parents, Walter and Honor, have rich though separate lives. But when Callie discovers the breast cancer she thought she'd beaten has returned, they all find that their lives shift to focus on caring for Callie. 'A beautifully written and intensely sad lesson in what it really means to love someone you know you're going to lose' Daily Telegraph 'Stylish, wickedly insightful . . . family, friends and love is truly, heartwrenchingly tested' Mirror 'A moving account of a family faced with a heartbreaking situation. I defy anyone to get through to the end without crying' Sunday Express Jane Green's internationally best-selling novels, including The Other Woman , Jemima J. , Babyville , The Patchwork Marriage (published as Another Piece of My Heart in the USA) Girl Friday ( Dune Road ), Life Swap ( Swapping Lives ), Second Chance , Straight Talking , Mr. Maybe , and Bookends , are moving and true to life. The Love Verb is published as Promises to Keep in the USA.

Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir, was born in early-nineteenth-century Russia and became famous as the only woman in the three-hundred-year history of Hasidism to function as a rebbe—or charismatic leader—in her own right. Nathaniel Deutsch follows the traces left by the Maiden in both history and legend to fully explore her fascinating story for the first time. The Maiden of Ludmir offers powerful insights into the Jewish mystical tradition, into the Maiden’s place within it, and into the remarkable Jewish community of Ludmir. Her biography ultimately becomes a provocative meditation on the complex relationships between history and memory, Judaism and modernity. History first finds the Maiden in the eastern European town of Ludmir, venerated by her followers as a master of the Kabbalah, teacher, and visionary, and accused by her detractors of being possessed by a dybbuk, or evil spirit. Deutsch traces the Maiden’s steps from Ludmir to Ottoman Palestine, where she eventually immigrated and re-established herself as a holy woman. While the Maiden’s story—including her adamant refusal to marry—recalls the lives of holy women in other traditions, it also brings to light the largely unwritten history of early-modern Jewish women. To this day, her transgressive behavior, a challenge to traditional Jewish views of gender and sexuality, continues to inspire debate and, sometimes, censorship within the Jewish community.