A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a thirty-year-old quiz-show writer. As Benjamin and his twin sister try to evade the police, they find themselves recalling their dead parents—the father who lost a leg in Vietnam, the mother who created children’s books—and their stories about trust, loss, and betrayal.
What is true, what is fake, what does it mean? Eighty years before the theft, these questions haunted Chagall and the enigmatic Yiddish fabulist Der Nister (“The Hidden One”), teachers at a school for Jewish orphans. Both the painting and the questions will travel through time to shape the Ziskinds’
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In her third novel, author Elizabeth Crook creates a transporting story of one family’s legacy over the course of one hundred years, stemming from the diaries of a frontier woman faced with the duties, passions, and dangers of her times.
In The Night Journal, the diaries of Hannah Bass have attracted the attention and devotion of academics and readers for decades. Candid and passionate, written in the 1890s, the journals offer the rare account of a woman in the American West during the Victorian era, a time of expansion, indiscriminant violence, and burgeoning industry.
Nearly a century later,
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Julia and her adopted brother, David, are sixteen years old. Julia is white. David is black. It is the mid-1980s, and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all-encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother—more involved with her church’s missionaries than her own children—and a violent father. In this riventing and heartrending memoir, Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals and their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and wry humor.
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As children wage mock battles in the playground of Woodside Elementary School, two students, a little girl and boy, seem to vanish, last seen heading toward the woods behind the school. Hours pass and then only one of them, Adam, a nine-year-old boy with autism, is found alive, the sole witness to the girl’s murder. Barely verbal on the best of days, Adam has retreated into a silent world that Cara, his mother, knows only too well. With her community in shock and her son unable to help with the police investigation, Cara tries to decode the puzzling events.
When another child goes missing,
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Meredith Hall’s moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her.
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Hick is the story of Luli McMullen—feisty, precocious, and out on her own at 13. Luli is running away from Nebraska to Las Vegas, where she plans to escape her disturbing present and even less hopeful future by finding herself a sugar daddy. That Luli finds trouble on the road almost immediately is no surprise. What is a surprise is that regardless of circumstances, Luli refuses to be a victim, even at her tender age. On her perilous journey west, she learns the truth of American rootlessness and discovers both the power and the peril of her own sexual curiosity.
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