Böcker utgivna av Jamie Langston Turner

"Celia sucked in her breath and stepped across the threshold. The hum of talk stopped, and she could sense that she was being weighed in the balances of their narrow minds and found severely wanting." A funeral brings Celia Coleman back to the small town she had hoped never to see again. Meanwhile, Bruce Healey is relocating to a basement apartment to be near his sister and niece. Neither can imagine the sparks that are about to fly as they confront their shame and lay hold of hope. About this book, the author says, "I'm still amazed at the turn the story took midway-something the characters insisted on, completely overriding my original intent."

"When I said the biggest yes of my life before I left her house that day, I had no way of knowing I was about to be slammed up against the wall." Meet Elizabeth Landis, lover of poetry, whose life is a neglected garden. Her journey through the brambles and tangled vines of her past begins on a mild February Sunday when she is confronted with two competing forces-redemption and betrayal. As she sifts through long-ago memories and present realities, she gradually sees herself with new eyes. About this book, Andy Crouch, author and public speaker, wrote in Books and Culture (July/August 2002): "At many moments within it, Turner executes a linguistic pirouette with such finesse that I was reluctant even to turn the page for fear that the words would somehow disappear."

"All her life she had recited the Twenty-Third Psalm, yet now, when it counted most, the truth seemed to elude her. Instead of comfort, she felt that her soul had been beaten with a rod and staff." The lives of three different families are woven into this story of faith. One side of the scales is heavily weighted with sorrow: fractured relationships, the death of a daughter, a house fire, an uninvited relative, guilt over things lost, and wayward children. The other side, however, bears the sure, solid counterbalance of forgiveness and grace, courage and restoration, faith and hope. From a letter to the author, a reader in Minnesota wrote: "I have never read anything that made me really know the characters as you did. . . . It was amazing-even down to little Samuel searching through the pockets on wash day."

"Sometimes a light is the blinding road-to-Damascus kind, but more often it's a faint glimmer far away but growing steadily brighter." Ben Buckley orders his days the same way he runs his business-carefully structured, compartmentalized, and closely guarded. An unsolved murder from twenty years earlier has cast a dark shadow of anger, guilt, and brokenness over his private life, obscuring any dreams of recovery. For years Ben has distracted himself with the study of word origins, but after the arrival of a new employee, he gradually starts to realize the simple, important words he has left unspoken. Now he must decide whether he has the courage to try to reclaim his family. From a review on the Book Report Network (2006), author and editor Marcia Ford wrote: "Turner's writing is often so elegant, so detailed and so richly textured that her books have distinguished themselves in a category all their own."

"If it is true, as they say, that a man must walk through darkness before he can become a writer, then I am well qualified." Following this book's original publication in 1998, Michelle Rapkin, Editorial Director of Doubleday/Crossings Book Club, wrote, "In a lifetime of reading, a handful of books stand out-this is one of them." In this story you'll meet Margaret Tuttle, who doesn't know how to give or receive love, and Birdie Freeman, who teaches her how to do both. Secrets are revealed, walls broken down, and lives changed. This is a book you will want to read again and again. From a review in Moody Magazine, Nov./Dec. 1998: "Achieves a literary excellence seldom seen in any novel and will leave no reader-believer or agnostic-untouched and unchallenged."

"Perry couldn't help wondering how different his life would have been had this woman actually been his grandmother." In Derby, South Carolina, an unlikely friendship is forged between two people who are poles apart in every way. In this novel, the Deep South meets the Midwest, youth meets age, the well-churched meets the unchurched, the extrovert meets the introvert. With characters you'll never forget, this colorfully realistic story portrays the unpredictable adventure of living life, with all its messiness and order, its longings and regrets, its sorrows and surprises. From the Greenville (SC) News by staff writer Deb Richardson-Moore on December 31, 1995: "As Turner weaves her tale with a wealth of vivid detail, she avoids both sentimentality and patness."