This packaged set of three acclaimed novels, covers twelve transformative years—1875 to 1887—in the life of the series’ big-hearted protagonist. The Reformer’s Apprentice opens with Frieda juggling a double life: adoring follower of a pioneer feminist and unpaid, harassed cook at her father’s San Francisco kosher boardinghouse. At twenty-two, she flees with an Arizona pioneer, a Jew, of sorts. In the First Lady of Dos Cacahuates Frieda survives sandstorms, flashfloods, heat, infidelity (surprisingly hers), fraudulence, and poverty. But Bennie’s love for her, Dos Cacahuates, and the desert proves contagious. Reckoning occurs in On Her Way Home, when her visiting kid sister is kidnapped by a murderer.
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Following the success of Snow Island (2002), Katherine Towler returns to the fictional New England island with Evening Ferry— the second installment of the multi-generational trilogy about family bonds, unexpected love, and the threat of war.
In the summer of 1965, Rachel returns to Snow Island to care for her injured father and discovers her mother’s diaries hidden in a closet. Reading Phoebe Shattuck’s account of her life as a wife and a mother, Rachel learns the truth about her own family’s history, her mother’s death, and her own aspirations to lead a new life.
In elegant prose and inspired storytelling,
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When Rebecca Monroe—married to Alistair, a scientist who doesn’t believe in fate, but rather genetic disposition—discovers that she is pregnant, she begins to question what makes us who we are and whether her own precarious family history will play a role in her future.
For Rebecca, the wry and observant narrator of The Family Tree, simple things said over breakfast take on greater meaning; a home-improvement project foreshadows darker things to come; the color of one’s eyes, the slope of a forehead are all missing pieces to the truth behind the family tree.
At once nostalgic and refreshingly original,
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For centuries her name has been a byword for feminine beauty, guile, and wisdom. This sweeping, meticulously researched novel restores Esther to her full, complex humanity while reanimating the glittering Persian Empire in which her story unfolded. Esther comes to that land as a terrified Jewish orphan betrothed to her cousin, a well-connected courtier. She finds a world racked by intrigue and unfathomable hatreds and realizes that the only way to survive is to win the heart of its king. Passionate, suspenseful, and historically authentic, The Gilded Chamber illuminates the dilemma of a woman torn between her heart and her sense of duty,
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Told through the eyes of a Midwestern minister nearing the end of his life, Gilead unfolds in the form of a letter. As Reverend Ames writes to his young son, we learn of the family’s legacy, a heritage steeped in abolition, economic hardship, and conflicting views on religion and war as each generation comes of age. The 1950s find John Ames comparing his grandfather, a fiery Union Army chaplain, to his devoutly pacifist father while a gentle turn of events poses the question of racial equality in new terms. Throughout the novel, he recalls a life shaped by love—for his faith,
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In this mesmerizing first novel by a gifted young writer, the drama of California’s rich immigrant history and the freshness and wonder of childhood combine with darker elements of legend, magic and mystery. Born while the Civil War is raging further east, young Asher Witherow seems marked for an extraordinary future. Anything but typical, he captures the attention of the eerily watchful apprentice minister and schoolteacher, Josiah Lyte, and of young Thomas Motion, a strange boy who can see into the deepest darkness. When Thomas mysteriously vanishes, only Asher knows the truth of what has happened to him, and he must decide whether to keep his knowledge secret or reveal what he believes to be his own unforgivable mistake.
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