Patsy MacLemoore, a twenty-eight-year-old history professor with a brand-new Ph.D. and a wild streak, wakes up in jail—yet again—after another epic alcoholic blackout. This time, though, a mother and daughter are dead, run over in Patsy’s driveway. Patsy will the next decades of her life atoning for this unpardonable act. She goes to prison, sobers up, marries a much older man she meets in AA, and makes ongoing amends to her victims’ family. Then, another piece of news turns up, casting her crime, and her life, in a different and unexpected light. Brilliant, morally complex, and often funny,
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It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly’s possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many phases of her friendship with Molly and their college friend Andrew, and comes to wonder whether they really knew each other at all. She revisits the intense closeness of their early days, the transformations they each made in the name of success and security, the lies they told each other, and betrayals they never acknowledged.
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“In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county.” So begins, innocently enough, J. Robert Lennon’s gripping and brilliant new novel. Awkward, guarded, and more than a little adamant about his need for privacy, Eric Loesch sets about renovating a rundown old house in the small, upstate New York town where he spent his childhood. When he inspects the title to the property, however, he discovers that there is a plot of dense forest smack in the middle of his land that he does not own.
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As Duchess of Aquitaine, Eleanor grew up knowing what it was to be regarded for herself and not for her husband’s title. Now, as wife to Louis VII and Queen of France, she has found herself unsatisfied with reflected glory—and feeling constantly under threat, even though she outranks every woman in Paris.
Then, standing beside her much older husband in the course of court ceremony, Eleanor locks eyes with a man—hardly more than a boy, really—across the throne room, and knows that her world has changed irrevocably…
He is Henry D’Anjou, eldest son of the Duke of Anjou,
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Asked to name her favorite book, sixteen-year-old Carley Wells answers, “never met one I liked.” Her parents are horrified and decide to commission a book to be written just for her. They will be the Medicis of Long Island and buy their daughter The Love of Reading. At first, Carley’s sole interest in the project is to distract Hunter, the young bibliophile she adores. But as Hunter’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic, Carley begins to understand the importance of stories-and how they are powerful enough to destroy a person. Or save her.
Tanya Egan Gibson’s debut novel is an irresistible work of metafiction that dazzlingly embeds a book within the book,
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In the summer of 1969, Seth Shapiro is twelve years old, and the personal tumult of his and his family’s lives plays out against the backdrop of the moon landing and Woodstock. Seth lives with his unstable mother, Ruth, his twin sister, Sarah, and his younger brother, Seamus, in a two-bedroom apartment in northern New Jersey. His father, a wealthy doctor, lives with his young French wife in a ten-room house and has no interest in Seth and his siblings. Seth is dying to escape from his mother’s craziness and often suffocating love for her children, her marriage to a man she’s known for two weeks,
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