Published to stellar critical acclaim in hardcover, Kiara Brinkman’s exquisite debut novel about a family in turmoil, as told in the deeply affecting voice of one extraordinary eight-year-old boy, is now in paperback.
All who know young Sebby Lane understand that he is an unusual child in many respects—that he experiences the world around him more vividly than most, a condition that only intensifies after the death of his best friend: his mother. Sebby misses her so acutely that he begins to dream and even relive moments of her life. When Sebby’s father decides to take Sebby to live in the family’s summerhouse,
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“”Now we’re just alike.”” So begins Fiona and Patricia’s friendship that warm autumn morning in first grade in Lake Charles, Louisiana, their bond forged ever closer by Fiona’s abusive mother and Patricia’s neglectful one. Their relationship is a source of continuity and strength through their move to L.A. to become actresses; through Fiona’s marriage and Patricia’s sudden fame. When husband and career pressures exact a toll, the women wonder if their friendship can survive. Then a dark secret from their past emerges, threatening to destroy not only their bond, but all they’ve worked for as well.
The Safety of Secrets is a beautifully written exploration of the bonds forged in childhood and challenged decades later,
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For Kelly Corrigan, family is everything.
At thirty-six, she had a marriage that worked, a couple of funny, active kids, and a weekly newspaper column. But even as a thriving adult, Kelly still saw herself as George Corrigan’s daughter. A garrulous Irish-American charmer from Baltimore, George was the center of the ebullient, raucous Corrigan clan. He greeted every day by opening his bedroom window and shouting, “Hello, World!” Suffice it to say, Kelly’s was a colorful childhood, just the sort a girl could get attached to.
Kelly lives deep within what she calls the Middle Place—”that sliver of time when parenthood and childhood overlap”—comfortably wedged between her adult duties and her parents’
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Nine-year-old Lawrence is the man in his family. He carefully watches over his willful little sister, Jemima, and his mother, Hannah. When Hannah becomes convinced that their estranged father is stalking them, the family flees London and heads for Rome, where Hannah lived happily as a young woman. For Lawrence, fascinated by stories of popes and emperors, Rome is an adventure. Though they are short of money, and move from home to home, staying with his mother’s old friends, little by little their new life seems to be taking shape. But the trouble that brought them to Italy will not quite leave them in peace.
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Set in the early eighteenth century, Vivaldi’s Virgins depicts the last days of the Republic, a place of wild extremes and intriguing mysteries where the hedonistic pleasures of Carnival and the severe austerity embodied by the Grand Inquisitor coexist and often collide. Seen through the perceptive eyes of Anna Maria dal Violin, this lyrical coming-of-age tale travels from the luxurious palaces of the elite and grand high society galas to the poverty of the Jewish Ghetto and the tenements of the underclass, capturing the city’s magnificent heights, its squalid depths and everything in between.
A foundling given the name of her instrument,
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Sometimes to be who you really are, you have to pretend you’re already who you want to be.
At two, Delores’s mother dropped her into the shallow end of a lake, trusting instinct would teach her daughter to swim. From then on, the water is where Delores Walker feels most at home. Now, nearly seventeen, she’s boarding a Greyhound bus leaving the Bronx for sunny Weeki Wachee Springs, a tacky roadside attraction in the shadow of Walt Disney’s new Florida phenomenon.
With a hundred silver dollars left behind by her runaway dad,
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