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SONGS WITHOUT WORDS

 Ann Packer’s new novel centers around two childhood friends, Liz and Sarabeth, as they navigate the challenges of their lives as adults, confront loneliness and near tragedy, and test both the limits and the redemptive power of their friendship.

Songs Without Words is a novel about friendship and about family, but it is also very much about suicide. Sarabeth remarks that Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, which she is reading at a retirement home, are not so much about adultery as about suicide. Adultery is an issue,

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HEART IN THE RIGHT PLACE

Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home—to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community. With great humor and great tenderness, Heart in the Right Place shows that some of our biggest heroes are the ones living right beside us.

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TRESPASS

 Trespass is an ambitious intellectual thriller about a comfortable, cultivated American family forced into sudden proximity with the discomfiting, the lawless, and the wild—particularly the wildness of history.

Chloe Dale’s life is in good order. Her only child, Toby, has started his junior year at New York University; her husband, an academic on sabbatical, is working at home on his book about the Crusades; and Chloe is busy creating illustrations for a special edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Yet Chloe is disturbed—by the aggression of her government’s foreign policy, by the poacher who roams the land behind her studio punctuating her solitude with rifle fire,

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STILL LIFE WITH HUSBAND

 Meet Emily Ross, thirty years old, married to her college sweetheart, and personal advocate for cake at breakfast time.

Meet Emily’s husband, Kevin, a sweet technical writer with a passion for small appliances and a teary weakness for Little Women.

Enter David, a sexy young reporter with longish floppy hair and the kind of face Emily feels the weird impulse to lick.

In this captivating novel of marriage and friendship, Lauren Fox explores the baffling human heart and the dangers of getting what you wish for.

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THE SENATOR’S WIFE

 Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love.

Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia Naughton–wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton–is Meri’s new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Delia’s husband’s chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship,

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WHEN THE WHITE HOUSE WAS OURS

 Amidst the uncertainty of the most controversial election in American history, presidential historian Daniel Truitt looks back at another tumultuous time, nearly twenty-five years before…. It’s 1976 and while the country prepares to celebrate the bicentennial Daniel’s family is falling apart. His father, Pete, has been fired from yet another teaching job, and his mother, Valerie, is one step away from packing up the van and leaving for good. But when Pete convinces a wealthy old friend and rival to lend him a crumbling mansion in Washington, DC, mere blocks from the White House, he makes a bold plan: to move east and start a democratic school under his own roof,

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