Ann Packer’s new novel centers around two childhood friends, Liz and Sarabeth, as they navigate the challenges of their lives as adults, confront loneliness and near tragedy, and test both the limits and the redemptive power of their friendship.
Songs Without Words is a novel about friendship and about family, but it is also very much about suicide. Sarabeth remarks that Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, which she is reading at a retirement home, are not so much about adultery as about suicide. Adultery is an issue,
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Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home—to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community. With great humor and great tenderness, Heart in the Right Place shows that some of our biggest heroes are the ones living right beside us.
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In Live Boldly, Mary Anne Radmacher identifies an assortment of qualities for our life’s journey and defines each as it relates to laughing loudly, loving truly, playing often, working smart, and sharing your heart. Each definition is followed by a quote, a poem, an aphorism that explores the quality. Stories culled from Mary Anne’s own life and teaching practice followed by an invitation to the reader to listen more closely to their lives, to give themselves what they need and to step back into their daily lives, knowing they can choose, in that moment, to live boldly by their own definition.
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Nicole Mones transports readers to the fascinating world of elite cuisine in modern China with the story of an American food writer traveling in Beijing. Recently widowed Maggie MacElroy is unexpectedly called to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate. Shocked that he may have led a secret life, she immerses herself in work as a palliative. She is sent to profile Sam, a Chinese-American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the Imperial Palace. As he prepares an elaborate banquet as his audition for the Cultural Olympics, Maggie learns to appreciate the beauty and balance,
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From her calamitous birth in Manitoba in 1905 to her journey with her father to Indiana, throughout her years as a wife, mother, and widow, Daisy Stone Goodwill struggled to understand her place in her own life. Now, in old age, Daisy attempts to tell her life story through a novel. She listens, she observes, and, through sheer force of imagination, she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers in between.
“She enlarges on the available material, extends, shrinks, reshapes what’s offered; this mixed potion is her life.
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Trespass is an ambitious intellectual thriller about a comfortable, cultivated American family forced into sudden proximity with the discomfiting, the lawless, and the wild—particularly the wildness of history.
Chloe Dale’s life is in good order. Her only child, Toby, has started his junior year at New York University; her husband, an academic on sabbatical, is working at home on his book about the Crusades; and Chloe is busy creating illustrations for a special edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Yet Chloe is disturbed—by the aggression of her government’s foreign policy, by the poacher who roams the land behind her studio punctuating her solitude with rifle fire,
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