Once in a Promised Land is the story of Jassim and Salwa, who left the deserts of their native Jordan for those of Arizona, each chasing mirages of opportunity and freedom. Although the couple lives far from Ground Zero, they cannot escape the dust cloud of paranoia settling over the nation. A hydrologist, Jassim believes passionately in his mission to make water accessible to all people, but his work is threatened by an FBI witch hunt for domestic terrorists. A Palestinian now twice displaced, Salwa embraces the American dream. She grapples to put down roots in an unwelcoming climate,
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A haunting, evocative portrait of three generations of a family by an exciting and inspired new voice in fiction.
It is the summer of 1945 in Norfolk, England, and when Goose comes upon a German soldier buried neck deep in the mud of a local salt marsh, she pulls him out and brings him home. Nine months later, he vanishes in a makeshift boat, leaving Goose behind with a newborn daughter, Lil. Taught to read the clouds by her mother, Lil is curious and her childhood strange. When she becomes the object of two brothers’
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Six years ago, Polly Birdswell—drinking and deeply unhappy—made a decision that changed her life forever. Believing she could spare her young daughter a legacy of self-destruction, she left her husband and child and moved north to a coastal town in Maine. There, close to Bride Island, the beloved family retreat she considers her true home, she set about getting sober and rebuilding her life. Now Polly desperately wants seven-year-old Monroe back, and is determined to prove—to herself especially—that she’s a stable and loving mother. But can she move forward when her family and friends won’t let her forget the past?
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Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain “devoted”—as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters’ long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn’t understand how Frances can ignore the past their father’s presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother’s death twenty-five years earlier. As Thanksgiving arrives, with a houseful of guests, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of a shared past, their conflict escalating to a dramatic,
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In this lovely, unconventional, and often funny memoir, Catherine Goldhammer wakes in middle age to find herself stunned, newly separated, and several tax brackets poorer, forced by circumstance to move from the affluent New England suburb of her daughter’s childhood into a new, more rustic life by the sea. Against all logic, partly to please her daughter and partly for reasons not clear to her at the time, she begins this yars of transition by purchasing six baby chickens—whose job, she comes to suspect, is to pull her and her daughter forward, out of one life and into another.
As she gradually transforms her new home—with its tawdry exterior but radiant soul—tile by tile,
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In the latter half of the eleventh century, the renowned scholar Salomon ben Isaac (or Rashi) breaks with tradition by teaching each of his three daughters, Joheved, Miriam, and Rachel, the intricacies of the Talmud. When Miriam loses her betrothed and childhood study partner, Benjamin, she feels as if her life has come to an end. And yet familial and societal pressures demand that she move past his death and choose a husband. So when handsome Judah ben Natan appears in the French city of Troyes, seeking a wife who is both modest and a scholar, it appears as if fate,
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