Nicole Mones transports readers to the fascinating world of elite cuisine in modern China with the story of an American food writer traveling in Beijing. Recently widowed Maggie MacElroy is unexpectedly called to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate. Shocked that he may have led a secret life, she immerses herself in work as a palliative. She is sent to profile Sam, a Chinese-American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the Imperial Palace. As he prepares an elaborate banquet as his audition for the Cultural Olympics, Maggie learns to appreciate the beauty and balance,
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THE STONE DIARIES
From her calamitous birth in Manitoba in 1905 to her journey with her father to Indiana, throughout her years as a wife, mother, and widow, Daisy Stone Goodwill struggled to understand her place in her own life. Now, in old age, Daisy attempts to tell her life story through a novel. She listens, she observes, and, through sheer force of imagination, she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers in between.
“She enlarges on the available material, extends, shrinks, reshapes what’s offered; this mixed potion is her life.
TRESPASS
Trespass is an ambitious intellectual thriller about a comfortable, cultivated American family forced into sudden proximity with the discomfiting, the lawless, and the wild—particularly the wildness of history.
Chloe Dale’s life is in good order. Her only child, Toby, has started his junior year at New York University; her husband, an academic on sabbatical, is working at home on his book about the Crusades; and Chloe is busy creating illustrations for a special edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Yet Chloe is disturbed—by the aggression of her government’s foreign policy, by the poacher who roams the land behind her studio punctuating her solitude with rifle fire,
STILL LIFE WITH HUSBAND
Meet Emily Ross, thirty years old, married to her college sweetheart, and personal advocate for cake at breakfast time.
Meet Emily’s husband, Kevin, a sweet technical writer with a passion for small appliances and a teary weakness for Little Women.
Enter David, a sexy young reporter with longish floppy hair and the kind of face Emily feels the weird impulse to lick.
In this captivating novel of marriage and friendship, Lauren Fox explores the baffling human heart and the dangers of getting what you wish for.
STONE CREEK
In the small town of Stone Creek, a random encounter offers two lonely people a chance at happiness.
Danny, a young widower, still grieves for his late wife, but for the sake of his five-year-old son, Caleb, he knows he must move on. Alone in her summer house, Lily has left her workaholic husband, Paul, to his long hours and late nights back in the city. In Stone Creek, she can yearn in solitude for the treasure she’s been denied: a child.
What occurs when Lily and Danny meet is immediate and undeniable—despite Lily being ten years older and married.
THE SENATOR’S WIFE
Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love.
Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia Naughton–wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton–is Meri’s new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Delia’s husband’s chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship,