It is the Great Depression. Abandoned by his beautiful wife, Henry and his two young children, Thomas and Margaret, spend that summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. Henry, an itinerant butcher, struggles to provide for his children but often must leave them alone as he travels the county in search of work. And while Henry loves his children deeply, he is devastated by their mother’s desertion, refusing to tell them why she left or if she’ll return. When Mrs. Phyllis Farley, a prosperous neighbor, begins to woo the children as companions for her strange, housebound son,
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In her remarkable follow-up to the widely acclaimed The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd tells a beautiful and haunting story centered around forty-two-year-old Jessie Sullivan, a woman in quiet crisis whose return home to the island of a mermaid saint becomes a pilgrimage to self-awakening. In this powerful exploration of mid-life marriage and the intersection of the spiritual and the erotic in the feminine soul, Kidd illustrates the sacredness of belonging to oneself and the healing mercy of love and forgiveness. Jessie’s journey begins in the winter of 1988 when she receives an early-morning call from her mother Nelle’s close friend Kat.
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Max Wolinsky comes from a family of mostly upstanding salesmen. On the eve of his son’s bar mitzvah, he returns home to Philadelphia, where he plans to put the finishing touches on a not-so-honorable business transaction and then disappear quietly back to Florida. Nothing, however, goes as planned. Coming home, it seems, means coming to terms with his family. It means facing the expectations of his father, the needs of his stroke-addled uncle, and the adolescent tribulations of his son. Honest, funny, and moving, Responsible Men is a portrait of three generations of men struggling to be good sons and good fathers in a world of big dreams and bigger temptations.
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Twenty years later, a woman writes of the man she loves and the defining moment he experiences in Mississippi in the late l960s, leading to a possible reunion of the long-separated pair.
When Caleb Montiel and Susan Masters meet in a Harvard writing class in l969, they make a pact: if either lives a story they know they emotionally cannot handle, they will gift it to the other to write. Twenty years later, Susan, now a successful novelist, receives a box of journals from Caleb, whom she has not seen since l970. Susan will finally be allowed to love Caleb as she has always wished through the story she writes.
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When an elderly and newly widowed Ukrainian immigrant declares his intention to remarry, his intended turns out to be a voluptuous gold digger from the old country with a proclivity for green satin underwear and an insatiable appetite for the good life of the West. And so his children Vera and Nadezhda must set aside years of bitter rivalry to rescue their annoyingly frisky father who (when he is not pursuing Valentina) is busily writing a grand history of the tractor and its role in human progress. As the intrigues multiply and secrets spill out, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian takes in love and suffering,
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This stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down’s syndrome. For motives he tells himself are good, he makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a brilliantly crafted story of parallel lives,
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