Ellie thinks she’s marrying into the ideal family but soon realizes that her perfect mother-in-law, Linda, can be a perfect monster. What Linda thinks is generous and affectionate, Ellie sees as manipulative and invasive; from commandeering the wedding to crowding the vacation plans, Ellie can’t escape her mother-in-law’s meddling. To make matters worse, her husband, Dan, offers little support in the escalating struggles between mother- and daughter-in-law. With a nuanced eye for detail and expression, Green reveals not only the frustrations and compromises involved with family life, but also the ever-evolving nature of female friendship. As Ellie navigates through marriage and motherhood,
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When she was seven, Rachel Manija Brown’s parents, post-60s hippies, left California for an ashram in a cobra-ridden, drought-stricken spot in India to devote themselves to Meher Baba, best known as the guru to Pete Townshend of The Who. Despite the fact that Rachel is the only foreign child within a 100-mile radius, she manages to keep her wits and humor about her when everyone else seems to have lost touch with reality. Filled with eccentric characters, this astutely observed and laugh-out-loud funny debut memoir marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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Inhabiting an island off the coast of Maine, left to her by her great-uncle Arno, Hannah finds her life as a dedicated and solitary artist rudely interrupted one summer when a dog, matted with feathers and seaweed, arrives with the tide. The dog quickly endears himself to her and easily adapts to Hannah’s schedule, but he is only the first of a series of unexpected visitors. He is soon followed by a teenager running from an abusive father, a half sister in trouble, a mainland family in need, and a trapped whale. Now in the midst of a community that depends on her for support and love,
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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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