Lucky Strike is the story of a young widow who is prospecting uranium with her children in Utah in 1954. Zafris’ characters, all mildly desperate, are searching less for ore than for themselves—for redemption, connection, even hope. Jean has sped west with her young children to give her seriously ill son one last adventure and to escape from the weight of too many failed relationships; camp neighbor, Jo, is struggling to endure marriage to a hateful man; and Harry, a salesman, is alienated from his Mormon heritage.
Only Jean’s daughter, Beth, recognizes the epic that is their common search for a thread of ore and riches in the desert Southwest.
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A nonfiction She’s Come Undone, Fat Girl is a powerfully honest and darkly riveting memoir of obsession with food and body image, penned by a Guggenheim and NEA award-winning writer. For anyone who’s ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how they look, for anyone who’s ever knowingly or unconsciously used food to fill a hole in their heart, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss.
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Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, is back in top form with a richly textured novel about a tragic accident and its effects on two generations of a family.
When Aaron Maciver’s beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers brain damage in a bike accident, she is left with the intellectual powers of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own.
Narrated by Aaron’s son,
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In The Fisherman’s Quilt, young Nora Hunter arrives in Alaska with her fisherman husband and infant daughter. She brings her first, fancy quilt to Alaska, along with an idealistic vision of life on America’s last frontier.
Soon after arriving in the town of Kodiak, Nora’s husband is off on a fishing boat, pursuing the “deadliest catch.” As she realizes she is the wife of a loner, Nora encounters the dark side of Kodiak culture – instability, alcoholism, greed, recklessness, disloyalty, loneliness, and drug-taking.
Nora doesn’t accept the culture she’s found and as she seeks another,
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In The Sweet Life, Lynn York catches up with the good people of Swan’s Knob, North Carolina for another poignant, funny, and beautifully realized glimpse of small-town life.
It’s been eight years since Roy Swan successfully won the hand of the piano teacher and resident choir director, Miss Wilma, and their lives have settled into a state of happy predictability. All that changes with the arrival Miss Wilma’s teenage granddaughter and Harper, the girl’s father. When Harper convinces Roy to let him stage a “small” country and bluegrass concert in his pasture, it draws thousands of screaming fans,
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When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever. Charming and debonair, the spitting image of Cary Grant, Martin sweeps Cornelia off her feet, but, as it turns out, Martin Grace is more the harbinger of change than change itself.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, eleven-year-old Clare Hobbs must learn to fend for herself after her increasingly unstable mother has a breakdown and disappears. Taking inspiration from famous orphans (Anne Shirley, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, and even Harry Potter) Clare musters the courage to seek out her estranged father.
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