When the Rajasekharan family’s rubber-plantation servant girl is dismissed for unnamed crimes, it is only the latest in a series of precipitous losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha’s life. In the space of several weeks her grandmother passed away under mysterious circumstances, and Uma, her older sister, left for Columbia University, forever. Aasha is left stranded in a family, and a country, slowly going to pieces.
Circling through years of family history to arrive at the moment of Uma’s departure, Evening is the Whole Day illuminates in heartbreaking detail one Indian immigrant family’s layers of secrets and lies,
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When Bennie Ford’s flight is cancelled, he finds himself stranded at Chicago’s O’Hare airport with the growing realization that he will miss his daughter’s wedding. Worse, he’s breaking their deal: that they will spend time getting to know one another before his daughter, whom he hasn’t seen or contacted in more than twenty years, will allow him to walk her down the aisle. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he puts pen to paper. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a lament for a life gone awry, for years misspent,
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Set in Hong Kong during the outbreak of World War II, and its aftermath ten years later, The Piano Teacher alternates between the lives of two vastly different women whose destinies are linked by the events of the war. In 1952, Claire is a provincial newlywed from England, recently arrived in the flourishing colony of Hong Kong. She is hired by the Chens, a wealthy Chinese couple, to give their daughter piano lessons. She soon becomes involved with Will Truesdale, an enigmatic expatriate whose visible and emotional injuries raise questions about his past. Through the Chens and her new love,
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Sarah McConnell’s husband had been dead for three months when she saw him in the grocery store.
What does a woman do when she’s thirty-nine, childless, and completely alone for the first time in her life? Does it mean she’s crazy to think she sees her late husband beside a display of pumpkins? Or is it just what people do, a natural response to grief that will fade in time? That’s what Sarah McConnell’s friends told her, that it was natural, would last a season, and then fade away.
But what if there was another answer?
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Sarah Lucas imagined the rest of her days would be spent living peacefully in her rural Vermont home, in the steadfast company of her husband. But after Charles dies suddenly, seventy-five-year-old Sarah is left inconsolably alone—until a variety of wayward souls come seeking shelter in her big, empty home. As Sarah and this unruly flock form a family of sorts, they nurture and protect one another, discovering their unsuspected strengths and courage.
In the tradition of Jane Smiley and Sue Miller, Kate Maloy has crafted a wise and gratifying novel about a woman who gracefully accepts a surprising new role just when she thinks her best years are behind her.
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“You can always start again,” Kate Robinson’s mother once told her, “all it takes is a new thread.” Overwhelmed by heartbreak and loss, the struggling twenty-six-year-old fashion designer follows her mother’s advice and flees to her ancestral homeland of Ireland, hoping to break free of old patterns and reinvent herself.
She arrives on the west coast, in the seaside hamlet of Glenmara. In this charming, fading Gaelic village, Kate quickly develops a bond with members of the local lace-making society: Bernie, alone and yearning for a new purpose since the death of her beloved husband,
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