Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at Fayer Academy fifteen years ago. She has since become one of the best teachers the school has ever had. But Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. When she accepts an impulsive marriage proposal, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. The English Teacher is a passionate tale of a mother and son’s vital bond and a provocative look at our notions of intimacy, honesty, loyalty and the real meaning of home. A triumphant and masterful follow-up to her acclaimed,
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From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
A spare, lucid, and remarkably moving examination of the year following her husband’s sudden death just before their fortieth anniversary, The Year of Magical Thinking is the story of Didion’s search for answers, for relief, and above all for the chance to change the course of events.
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As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history by the author of the international bestseller Year of Wonders.
From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father,
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A mother’s memoir celebrates the joys and demands of raising a Down syndrome child.
From the moment she held him in her arms, Anne Crosby had deep fears for her newborn son. Although the staff at the hospital in London paid no attention to her concerns, her instincts were correct: Matthew had Down syndrome. After struggling with her contradictory feelings, Crosby set about doing whatever she could to help Matthew lead as full a life as possible. Matthew is the moving, honest, perceptive, and often funny account of the life he made with the help of his mother and many other caring people.
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A moving, vividly told memoir full of heart, drama, and exquisite comic timing, about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar.
J.R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: It was the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, J.R. would press his ear to a clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of masculinity, and the keys to his own identity. J.R.’s mother was his world, his anchor, but he needed something else, something he couldn’t name.
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The Days of Awe is a complex, compellingly readable and skillfully executed novel that deals with one of the most profound realizations that must come home to nearly all of us at one point or another: the real understanding that we and all of those we love are going to die.
It is August 2001 in New York City, and Artie Rubin, author of numerous illustrated books of mythology, has reached 67. His friends are beginning to deteriorate one by one – and his beloved wife of forty years Johanna has recently been diagnosed with elevated blood pressure and cholesterol and is at high risk for a heart attack.
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