Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice followed her first husband to the Deep South and soon found her relatives fighting on opposite sides of the Civil War. Back in New England, Eunice and her children struggled to get by — until Eunice fell in love with a well-to-do black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the British Caribbean. Tracking every lead in the family letters, Hodes retraced Eunice’s footsteps and met descendants along the way. The Sea Captain’s Wife takes up grand themes of American history —
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Thinking largely of escaping a complicated love-life and having fun on the beach, eighteen-year old Cori signs up for a ten-week trip to help build a church on a remote island in Indonesia.
Six weeks into the trip, a conflict that has been simmering for years flames to deadly life on the nearby island of Ambon. Before they can leave, Cori and her teammates find themselves caught up in the destructive wave of violence washing over the Christian and Muslim villages in the area. Within days they are forced to flee into the hazardous refuge of the mountains with only the pastor’s son to guide them.
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Colin Scott reads people for a living. They bare their souls on paper, and he sells them to the highest bidder. His work as a top literary agent representing big name authors has turned his youthful ambitions into everything he ever wanted.
But Colin’s passion for molding new writers into proven talent has somehow become aggravating and routine. On top of this mounting cynicism and professional monotony, Colin and his wife are trying desperately to have a baby.
Every decision he has ever made now has a question mark after it. And his usually clear-cut motivations are leading toward a nervous breakdown.
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The new novel from one of Ireland’s most prominent voices, The Gathering is an extraordinary anatomization of a family confronting the ghosts of its history.
A dazzling writer of international stature, Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a return to an intimate canvas and a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family haunted by the past.
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother,
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“Knowing was an ‘illumination.’ During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I’ve had these moments of ‘knowing’ one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet, these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die.” —Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook
“The two women were alone in the London flat.”
So begins Doris Lessing’s most famous novel,
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In the best-selling tradition of The Color of Water comes a beautifully written, evocative memoir of a relationship between a mother and son—and the Chinese-American experience.
In The Eighth Promise, author William Poy Lee gives us a rare view of the Asian-American experience from a mother-son perspective. His moving and complex story of growing up in the housing projects of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1960s and ’70s unfolds in two voices—the author’s own and that of his mother—to provide a sense of tradition and culture. It is a stunning tale of murder,
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