At 34, Scarlet Kavanagh has the kind of homecoming no child wishes, a visit back to family and dear friends for the gentle passing of her mother, Addie, a famous bird artist and an even more infamous environmental activist. Though Addie and her husband, ornithologist Tom Kavanagh, have made their life in southeastern Pennsylvania, Addie has chosen to die at the New Jersey home of her dearest friend, Cora. This is because the Kavanagh’s ramshackle cottage is filled with too much history and because, in the last ten years or so, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, even bird song has seemed to make Addie angry,
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Small wonder that, at nine years old, Monica Holloway develops a fascination with the local funeral home. With a father who drives his Ford pickup with a Kodak movie camera sitting shotgun just in case he sees an accident, and whose home movies feature more footage of disasters than of his children, Monica is primed to become a morbid child.
Yet in spite of her father’s bouts of violence and abuse, her mother’s selfishness and prim denial, and her siblings’ personal battles and betrayals, Monica never succumbs to despair. Instead, she forges her own way,
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When James Walker arrives at Tudor College, Cambridge, he tries to create a vague air of mystery about himself in the hope of making the right kind of friends. By accident or fate he encounters a member of the Night Climbers, a wealthy, secretive, and tantalizingly eccentric circle of undergraduates who scale the college towers and gargoyles at night in pursuit of the kind of thrill-seeking danger that makes them feel truly alive.
Seduced by their reckless charisma and talent for decadence, James falls for both Francis, the group’s ringleader, and Jessica, his beautiful best friend. Their extravagant living is financed,
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In the small town of Stone Creek, a random encounter offers two lonely people a chance at happiness.
Danny, a young widower, still grieves for his late wife, but for the sake of his five-year-old son, Caleb, he knows he must move on. Alone in her summer house, Lily has left her workaholic husband, Paul, to his long hours and late nights back in the city. In Stone Creek, she can yearn in solitude for the treasure she’s been denied: a child.
What occurs when Lily and Danny meet is immediate and undeniable—despite Lily being ten years older and married.
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At age twelve, Mende Nazer lost her childhood. It began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, setting fire to the village huts and murdering the adults. The raiders rounded up thirty-one young children, including Mende, who was eventually sold to a wealthy Arab family in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. So began Mende’s seven dark years of enslavement. Normally, Mende’s story never would have come to light, but when she was sent to work for another master—a diplomat working in London—she made a dramatic break for freedom.
Published to critical acclaim for the honesty and clarity of its prose,
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Perhaps it was because she was pregnant and hormones had eaten her brain that Judith O’Reilly was persuaded by her husband to leave London for the northern wilds. But pregnancy hadn’t addled her enough not to have a back-up plan: if life in the country didn’t measure up, the family would return to the city.
Far from home, Judith, a journalist and mother of three young children, discovers just how tough an assignment making a new life is. In the heart of the country, with no decent coffee in sight, Judith swaps high heels for rubber boots and media-darlings for evangelical strangers and farmers’
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