Real Women – Real Stories – Real Challenges – Real Victories
What’s a woman to do? If she makes a bad choice or gets thrown one of life’s curveballs, is she forever doomed?
Author Annmarie Kelly says “NO!” and proves it with compelling real life stories of women who faced and overcame seemingly overwhelming life challenges. This powerfully moving book overflows with intelligence, understanding, emotion and true grit.
Kelly explains victory as the stretch you make out of your comfort zone and into the greater, fuller expression of who you really are – your authentic self. She demonstrates victory by taking you inside the lives of nine distressed women and showing you how they became victorious. You are likely to recognize something of yourself woven in each of these stories; each one will inspire and encourage you to forge your own victory over whatever is challenging you right now. At the end of each woman’s chapter you’ll find soul-searching questions that you must ask yourself to insure your own victories.
Author Kelly concludes the stories with a “lessons learned” chapter. Gleaning the best from each Victorious Woman, from the many other women she interviewed and from her own intriguing life challenges, Kelly describes the FOUR LIFESTYLES that either support you in victory or sabotage you, and the SIX SKILLS every woman has to learn to be in control of her SELF. She also gives you, her readers, the Victorious Woman Model to help you figure out what you need at different stages of challenges. The result is a book that is part inspiration, part motivation and part skill building. Some have called Victorious Woman “a blueprint for life” and “a practical approach to taking control of your life.”
Since its first publication, many women say that they keep Victorious Woman! on their book shelf for reference or on their nightstand for comfort at the end of a long day. This “celebration of life” is an encouraging and enlightening read for women who want to create their own personal and professional victories.

LOVE COMES LATER identities are tested and boundaries are questioned as the main characters, Hind, Abdulla, and Kavitha struggle for the right to establish a culture of their own despite their various conservative upbringing. Against the shifting backdrop of Doha, Qatar where she grew up, and London, England where she pursues a graduate degree, Hind is granted a temporary reprieve from her impending marriage to Abdulla, her cousin. Little does anyone suspect that the presence of Kavitha, her Indian-American roommate, could shake the carefully constructed future for the engaged cousins. Torn between loyalties to Hind and a growing attraction to Abdulla, Kavitha must choose between friendship and a burgeoning love.

  When we talk about “the city of love”, most of us immediately think of Paris,
Venice, Rome or another famous metropolis whose romantic stories we know from movies and novels. But to Barbara Conelli, none of them are the real city of love. To the author, love doesn’t mean passionate gestures, big promises of eternal devotion, ardent embraces, torrid kisses, or stormy arguments followed by even stormier reconciliations.

  To the author, love means something completely different and much simpler.
The smell of morning cappuccino and fresh pannetone at Pasticceria Marchesi. A
brisk stroll through the awakening city and sensual curves of gold shadows on the wet paving of Via della Spiga. Joyful shouts of bohemian artists and their graceful muses at Fornace Curti. A crispy panzerotto savored in the company of cantankerous pigeons on the piazzetta of San Fedele. Old furniture stores in narrow streets and adorable trinkets she can never resist. The tinkling of a tram from 1929 with uncomfortable wooden seats and a hundred-year-old conductor. Sublime flamingos and peevish peacocks in an emerald-green garden that has never been owned by anyone. Remote nooks and crannies whose secrets have been revealed only to her and the few ghosts with aristocratic hearts who appear in them from time to time. Visionary dreams, inextinguishable hopes, the desire to live, the courage to create, the strength to grow.To the author, love means all this and much more. This and much more is what she receives from the city that makes you fall in love a hundred times a day, breaking your heart over and over again, only to make it beat faster five minuteslater. Milan. Barbara’s city of love. The city she has adored since the year dotbecause it’s just like her: it has dozens of faces, it laughs and cries at the same time, it’s vain, unpredictable, and you never know what mood it wakes up with.
Join Barbara Conelli and submerge yourself in the secrets of this magical citythat has been breathing love for centuries. Love that is dignified, childish, creative, treacherous, passionate, painful, forgiving, crazy, insane, unbridled, endless, fleeting, unfaithful, platonic, carnal, hateful, desperate, volatile, conceited, and divine. The kind of love whose chalice you quickly drain, so that on the next corner, you can reach for another one, even more delicious and intoxicating.