Every expatriate holds a special dread of an unexpected middle-of-the-night phone call. It usually means that a dear loved one is gone and because of the distance from home, there's nothing the expat can do about it. At least, not right away. American Priscilla Lalisse-Jespersen learned that lesson the hard way. Lalisse-Jespersen, author of the novel Stockdale, is back, this time with the account of suddenly losing her father while she was thousands of miles away, living in Paris. Brimming with love and loss, Next of Kin takes the reader on an emotion-fraught journey, one that ends with...

Life is filled with random encounters and Ellery Roulet, a 35-year-old American PR executive living and working in Paris, has experienced enough of them to last five lifetimes. When betrayal, loss, mistakes, regrets and even acceptance enter Ellery's life at different times, she learns it is not what one experiences, but how one chooses to deal with those experiences that shapes the soul within. This bittersweet collection of tales shows just how messy and complicated life can be, and that sometimes there just aren't any neat and easy solutions at all.

In 5 Reasons to Leave a Lover, author Carolyn Moncel offers up a fresh batch of stories based on love and loss. As singer/songwriter, Paul Simon so eloquently suggested in a famous song from the 1970s, there are many ways to leave a lover. However, Moncel's characters demonstrate that the reasons for leaving in the first place are quite finite. Encounters in Paris Ellery and Julien Roulet return, picking up their lives where the short story, "Pandoras Box Revisited," ends. This time the Roulets are involved in a love triangle, and along with two other couples, must explore how love...