A smart, comic page-turner about a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer.
When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for — until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune. Meanwhile, four hundred miles south in Los Angeles, the Millers’ older daughter, Margaret, has been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her fledgling post-feminist magazine,
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Zeke is twenty-nine, a man who looks like a Raphael angel and who earns his living as a painter and carpenter in London. He reads the world a little differently from most people and has trouble with such ordinary activities as lying, deciphering expressions, recognizing faces. Verona is thirty-seven, confident, hot-tempered, a modestly successful radio-show host, unmarried, and seven months pregnant. When the two meet in a house that Zeke is renovating, they fall in love, only to be separated less than twenty-four hours later when Verona mysteriously disappears.
Both Zeke and Verona, it turns out, have complications in their lives,
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“I can put my eyes just at the top of the wheat and see the world stretch out flat to the sky.” With this secret diary entry, a lonely girl on a Texas wheat farm sets her sights on the larger life she yearns for. Her only companions are the Box Children, five tiny dolls she endows with the lives they lost as her mother’s miscarried babies over the years. With no privacy at all, a brave and clear-eyed Lou Ann Campbell writes her way through a coming-of-age summer as her mother’s latest pregnancy brings increasing insanity to the season’s harvest.
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The year is 1968. Like thousands of other American boys, Carl Melcher is drafted and sent to Vietnam. His new company is infected with the same racial tensions plaguing the nation. Despite that, Carl makes friends on both sides of the color line. The war, like a tiger lurking in the bushes, picks off its victims one by one. Naively over-optimistic, Carl believes that karma and good intentions will save him and his friends. Then fate intervenes to teach Carl something of the meaning of life, and death.
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This packaged set of three acclaimed novels, covers twelve transformative years—1875 to 1887—in the life of the series’ big-hearted protagonist. The Reformer’s Apprentice opens with Frieda juggling a double life: adoring follower of a pioneer feminist and unpaid, harassed cook at her father’s San Francisco kosher boardinghouse. At twenty-two, she flees with an Arizona pioneer, a Jew, of sorts. In the First Lady of Dos Cacahuates Frieda survives sandstorms, flashfloods, heat, infidelity (surprisingly hers), fraudulence, and poverty. But Bennie’s love for her, Dos Cacahuates, and the desert proves contagious. Reckoning occurs in On Her Way Home, when her visiting kid sister is kidnapped by a murderer.
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Following the success of Snow Island (2002), Katherine Towler returns to the fictional New England island with Evening Ferry— the second installment of the multi-generational trilogy about family bonds, unexpected love, and the threat of war.
In the summer of 1965, Rachel returns to Snow Island to care for her injured father and discovers her mother’s diaries hidden in a closet. Reading Phoebe Shattuck’s account of her life as a wife and a mother, Rachel learns the truth about her own family’s history, her mother’s death, and her own aspirations to lead a new life.
In elegant prose and inspired storytelling,
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