Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at Fayer Academy fifteen years ago. She has since become one of the best teachers the school has ever had. But Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. When she accepts an impulsive marriage proposal, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. The English Teacher is a passionate tale of a mother and son’s vital bond and a provocative look at our notions of intimacy, honesty, loyalty and the real meaning of home. A triumphant and masterful follow-up to her acclaimed,
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As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history by the author of the international bestseller Year of Wonders.
From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father,
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Poignant and compelling, evocative and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India and witnessed through the lives of two compelling and achingly real women, the novel shows how the lives of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and vividly captures how the bonds of womanhood are pitted against the divisions of class and culture.
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Seamlessly moving back and forth in time between the Soviet Union in the 1940s and contemporary America, The Madonnas of Leningrad is a searing portrait of war and remembrance, of the power of love, memory, and art to offer hope in the face of overwhelming despair. It is the story of Marina, an aging Russian woman caught in the grips of Alzheimer’s. While she cannot retain fresh memories, vivid images of her youth in Leningrad and the toturous German siege are preserved. To hold on to sanity when the Luftwaffe’s bombing began, she burned to memory the exquisite artworks of the Hermitage where she worked as a guide using them to furnish a “memory palace”
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As you read the newspapers with their daily stories of the Middle East and Afghanistan, do you ever wonder what Muslim family life is like, with men and women inhabiting separate parts of the home? Or what it would be like to be a woman in purdah? Mission to Kabul starts there, in 19th century India, then takes the protagonist from his comfortable, predictable environment on a life-changing journey. Attempting to protect his younger brother, Mahmoud is jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. This makes him vulnerable, on his release, to being blackmailed into undertaking a dangerous mission to Afghanistan.
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The Days of Awe is a complex, compellingly readable and skillfully executed novel that deals with one of the most profound realizations that must come home to nearly all of us at one point or another: the real understanding that we and all of those we love are going to die.
It is August 2001 in New York City, and Artie Rubin, author of numerous illustrated books of mythology, has reached 67. His friends are beginning to deteriorate one by one – and his beloved wife of forty years Johanna has recently been diagnosed with elevated blood pressure and cholesterol and is at high risk for a heart attack.
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