The de la Mare household, filled entirely with women, is not unlike many households on the tiny British island of Guernsey during World War II, where most men have left to join the army in its fight against the encroaching German forces. Vivienne feels little difference, however, in her husband Eugene’s absence from the life they lived when he resided at home as she raises their two daughters and cares for her ailing mother-in-law. He may have slept in the same bed, but the distance between them, then, was just as great.
Her life does change, though, when the Germans bomb their island and then occupy it,
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Merle’s Door meets the Daily Coyote in this extraordinary story of a dog’s journey back to her family. Sophie Tucker, a three-year-old Australian blue heeler, goes overboard into the predator infested waters of the Great Barrier Reef, and Sophie’s heartbroken family has given her up for lost; little do they know that Sophie swam six miles to an isolated nature preserve called St. Bees—where she survived unassisted for five months by living off the land. The story of her survival and rescue is nothing short of miraculous.
Journalist Emma Pearse delves into Sophie’s story and re-creates the accident and Sophie’s improbable journey.
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When the elliptical new drama teacher at Stellar Plains High School chooses for the school play Lysistrata—the comedy by Aristophanes in which women stop having sex with men in order to end a war—a strange spell seems to be cast over the school. Or, at least, over the women. One by one throughout the high school community, perfectly healthy, normal women and teenage girls turn away from their husbands and boyfriends in the bedroom, for reasons they don’t really understand. As the women worry over their loss of passion, and the men become by turns unhappy,
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A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
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What does your heart know?
Miranda Jones has always used her head. Her artist’s rep and mentors, parents and sister, always advised she must. With her paintings at a major fine art gallery, her journey as a struggling artist is finally paying off. But while her head told her success in a big city was what she wanted, her heart told her a simpler life in a small community would feel like home. Now that she’s moved, deeper questions surface: What is her life purpose? What’s missing? And what does her heart know that her head keeps ignoring?
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In the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, rests a huge rose-colored apartment building called The Astral. For decades it was the happy home of the poet Harry Quirk, his wife, Luz, and their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But when Luz finds poems that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, Harry is summarily kicked out, leaving him to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, and parental failures. With tremendous grace and acute perception, Kate Christensen details Harry’s floundering attempts to find his way back into Luz’s arms—and back to his better self—in a novel that is funny,
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