Gillian Cormier-Brandenburg is a virginal, narcoleptic, atheistic Harvard Divinity School student about to complete her Ph.D. When the faculty deems her dissertation unsuitable and threatens to revoke her fellowship funding, Gillian—determined to defend her topic—sets out to gather research. She takes a job at a halfway house for recovering addicts and struggles to shed her skin as an anxious and socially inept graduate student in order to become an unlikely figure of authority. The women at Responsibility House—including the motorcycle-obsessed Janet, former prostitute Florine, and house martyr Stacy—challenge Gillian at every step, and eventually inspire her to confront her limitations and find her place in the world.
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Before he wrote some of the twentieth century’s greatest fiction, before he married Zelda, F. Scott Fitzgerald loved Ginevra, a fickle young Chicago socialite he met during the winter break from Princeton. But Ginevra threw over the soon-to-be-famous novelist, and the rest is literary history. Ginevra would be the model for many of Fitzgerald’s coolly fascinating but unattainable heroines, including the elusive object of Jay Gatsby’s unrequited love, Daisy Buchanan.
In this captivating and moving novel, Caroline Preston imagines what life might have been like for Fitzgerald’s first love, following Ginevra from her gilded youth as the daughter of a tycoon through disillusioned marriage and motherhood.
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My Latest Grievance stars the beguiling teenager Frederica Hatch, the “Eloise of Dewing College.” Born and raised in the dormitory of this small women’s college and chafing under the care of “the most annoyingly evenhanded parental team in the history of civilization,” Frederica is starting to feel that her life is stiflingly snug. That all changes with the arrival on campus of a new dorm mother, the glamorous Laura Lee French, the frenetic center of her own universe.
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Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain “devoted”—as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters’ long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn’t understand how Frances can ignore the past their father’s presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother’s death twenty-five years earlier. As Thanksgiving arrives, with a houseful of guests, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of a shared past, their conflict escalating to a dramatic,
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Jilly Coppercorn and Geordie Riddell. Since they were introduced in the first Newford story, “Timeskip,” back in 1989, their friends and readers alike have been waiting for them to realize what everybody else already knows: that they belong together. But they’ve been more clueless about how they feel for each other than the characters in When Harry Met Sally. Now in Widdershins, a stand-alone novel of fairy courts set in shopping malls and the Bohemian street scene of Newford’s Crowsea area, Jilly and Geordie’s story is finally being told.
Before it’s over, we’ll find ourselves plunged into the rancorous and sometimes violent conflict between the magical North American “animal people”
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Slavery as it existed in Africa has seldom been portrayed—and never with such texture, detail, and authentic emotion. Inspired by actual 19th-century court records, Unconfessed is a breathtaking literary tour de force.
They called her Sila van den Kaap, slave of Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat of Plettenberg Bay, in the colony of South Africa. They called her murderer, and demanded that she explain her terrible violence. A woman fit for hanging . . . condemned to death on April 30, 1823, only to have her sentence commuted to a lengthy term on the notorious Robben Island.
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