One of her wilder books, The View from Mount Joy begins as the narrator (and hero) Joe Andreson and his mother have moved down to Minneapolis from a small town in Northern Minnesota. He joins the Class of ’72 at Ole Bull High School and two of the girls he meets — Kristi Casey, the cheerleading captain who assumes the earth’s orbit is for her benefit, and Darva Pratt, who cares more about art and politics than her ranking on the popularity chart – will impact the rest of his life.
We follow Joe’s story as he graduates high school and college and tumbles into a life that includes an unchosen,
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In searching for the answers to life’s enduring questions, Kit Bakke sends an e-mail to her heroine, Louisa May Alcott and is amazed to receive a reply. Their correspondence – a mixture of biography, history and autobiography – becomes an intertwined dance of ideas and stories, bridging the mix-1800s and the twenty-first century. Together, they discuss issues of women’s rights, the obligation to help the sick and needy, and the moral and personal responsibility to resist injustice and initiate reform.
For Kit Bakke, Alcott is considerably more than the author of Little Women. “Her abolitionist zeal,
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The End of the Alphabet is a tender, intimate story of an ordinary life defined by an extraordinary love. Ambrose Zephyr is a contented man. He shares a book-laden Victorian house with his loving wife, Zipper. He owns two suits, one of which he was married in. He is a courageous eater, save brussels sprouts. His knowledge of wine is vague and best defined as Napa, good; Australian, better; French, better still. Kir royale is his drink of occasion. For an Englishman he makes a poor cup of tea. He believes women are quantifiably wiser than men, and would never give Zipper the slightest reason to mistrust him or question his love.
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Colin Scott reads people for a living. They bare their souls on paper, and he sells them to the highest bidder. His work as a top literary agent representing big name authors has turned his youthful ambitions into everything he ever wanted.
But Colin’s passion for molding new writers into proven talent has somehow become aggravating and routine. On top of this mounting cynicism and professional monotony, Colin and his wife are trying desperately to have a baby.
Every decision he has ever made now has a question mark after it. And his usually clear-cut motivations are leading toward a nervous breakdown.
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The new novel from one of Ireland’s most prominent voices, The Gathering is an extraordinary anatomization of a family confronting the ghosts of its history.
A dazzling writer of international stature, Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a return to an intimate canvas and a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family haunted by the past.
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother,
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“Knowing was an ‘illumination.’ During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I’ve had these moments of ‘knowing’ one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet, these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die.” —Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook
“The two women were alone in the London flat.”
So begins Doris Lessing’s most famous novel,
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