Books published by publisher Center Point Books

“My life is very ordinary,” says Rory. “On the surface, it is not very special. If you looked at it, day to day, it wouldn’t seem like much. But when you look at it in a bigger context — as part of a larger story — you start to see the magic that is on the pages of the book that is my life. And the more you look, the more you see. Or, at least, I do.”

What do Hedy Lamarr, composer George Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The answer is spread-spectrum radio. Without this technology, we would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted today.Only a writer of Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes's caliber could do justice to this remarkable story. Unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer, Hedy Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II. She brought with her not only her theatrical talent but also a gift for technical innovation. An introduction to Antheil at a Hollywood dinner table culminated in a U.S. patent for a jam- proof radio guidance system for torpedoes -- the unlikely duo's gift to the U.S. war effort.What other book brings together 1920s Paris, player pianos, Nazi weaponry, and digital wireless into one satisfying whole? In its juxtaposition of Hollywood glamour with the reality of a brutal war, Hedy's Folly is a riveting book.

In 1962, on a rocky patch of sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper looks out over the incandescent waters of the sea and spies a woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. He learns that she is an American starlet who is said to be dying.And the story begins again in the present when half a world away, an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives including the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion.Gloriously inventive and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

Christmas is fast approaching, and New Bern, Connecticut, is about to receive the gift of a new pastor, hired sight unseen to fill in while Reverend Tucker is on sabbatical. Meanwhile, Margot Matthews' friend, Abigail, is trying to match-make even though Margot has all but given up on romance. She loves her job at the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop and the life and friendships she's made in New Bern; she just never thought she'd still be single on her fortieth birthday.It's a shock to the entire town when Phillip A. Clarkson turns out to be Philippa. Truth be told, not everyone is happy about having a female pastor. Yet despite a rocky start, Philippa begins to settle in -- finding ways to ease the townspeople's burdens, joining the quilting circle, and forging a fast friendship with Margot. When tragedy threatens to tear Margot's family apart, that bond -- and the help of her quilting sisterhood -- will prove a saving grace. And as she untangles her feelings for another new arrival in town, Margot begins to realize that it is the surprising detours woven into life's fabric that provide its richest hues and deepest meaning.

Set in the Patty Hearst era of radical black nationalism and political abductions, a black ex-boxer self-named Uhuru Nolica, the leader of a revolutionary cell called Scorched Earth, has kidnapped Rosemary Goldsmith, the daughter of a weapons manufacturer, from her dorm at UC Santa Barbara. If they don’t receive the money, weapons, and apology they demand, “Rose Gold” will die — horribly and publicly.

A candid and provocative memoir by the Oscar-winning actress and beloved Partridge Family icon, Shirley Jones.Shirley Jones is an American film legend of the first order, having starred in Oklahoma!, Carousel, The Music Man, and her Oscar-winning role as a prostitute in Elmer Gantry, all long before the iconic The Partridge Family. On the show, she portrayed the epitome of American motherhood, a symbol to thousands of families in the 1970s, and she remains a cult icon today.

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and our narrator, Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact: that I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she tells us. “It’s never going to be the first thing I share with someone. I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion, I’d scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half, and I loved her as a sister.”

In 1861 seventeen-year-old Abbie Garrett, living on Staten Island with her Southern mother and Yankee father, finds herself drawn firmly into the growing conflict between the North and the South with the arrival of her cousin Lorena from Charleston and the return from Atlanta of the two McIntyre brothers, the elder of whom has always had a special place in Abbie's heart.