Life changes in an instant. On a foggy beach. In the seconds when Abby Mason—photographer, fiancée soon-to-be-stepmother—looks into her camera and commits her greatest error. Heartbreaking, uplifting, and beautifully told, here is the riveting tale of a family torn apart, of the search for the truth behind a child’s disappearance, and of one woman’s unwavering faith in the redemptive power of love—all made startlingly fresh through Michelle Richmond’s incandescent sensitivity and extraordinary insight.
Six-year-old Emma vanished into the thick San Francisco fog. Or into the heaving Pacific. Or somewhere just beyond: to a parking lot,
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A Commonwealth Prize Winner
Celebrating the timeless power of storytelling, Mister Pip unites the stirring tale of a young girl’s quest for hope with a marvelous tribute to a Charles Dickens classic. Thirteen-year-old Matilda is coming of age on a Pacific island that has been torn apart by war. Almost everyone, including her father, has left to find work or escape the danger. Among those few who remain is the eccentric and mysterious Mr. Watts, the island’s sole remaining white man, who takes on the role of teacher and begins to read Great Expectations aloud to the students.
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Marie Sharp, a child of the 1960s, is entering her own 60s. Behind her is a life full of experiences: not just marriage, family, divorce, and work but also experimenting with drugs and having unprotected sex. In other words, Marie has lived. She has had adventures. She has been known to be reckless and irresponsible, at least by today’s standards. Now she’s old and wants to feel that way.
In No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club, Marie swears off all kinds of things that her friends and contemporaries are embracing: book clubs,
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Mary Lawson’s first novel, Crow Lake, mesmerized readers across the country and became a New York Times bestseller, a rare achievement for a debut author. With The Other Side of the Bridge she enchants us again, weaving together the stories of two families as they seek solace and redemption across two generations.
Set against the backdrop of northern Ontario’s haunting landscapes, The Other Side of the Bridge opens with an unforgettable image of Arthur and Jake Dunn, two brothers whose jealousies will take them beyond the edge of reason,
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In the beautifully written, multi-layered novel Plum Wine, Angela Davis-Gardner portrays the love story between Seiji, a Japanese potter who endured the terrors brought about by the Hiroshima bombing, and Barbara Jefferson, a lonely young American teaching English at an all-girls Tokyo university. This tale is much more than a romance; the narrative combines elements of mystery, culture, history, literature, and poetry in one woman’s life-altering journey through the recent past.
Plum Wine is set in Japan during the Vietnam War era. At the onset of the novel,
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Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father’s constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters?
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