During the long farewell of her mother’s dying, Patricia Hampl revisits her Midwestern girlhood. Daughter of a debonair Czech father, whose floral work gave him entre into St. Paul society, and a distrustful Irishwoman with an uncanny ability to tell a tale, Hampl remained, primarily and passionately, a daughter well into adulthood. She traces the arc of faithfulness and struggle that comes with that role from the postwar years past the turbulent sixties. The Florist’s Daughter is a tribute to the ardor of supposedly ordinary people. Its concerns reach beyond a single life to achieve a historic testament to midcentury middle America.
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A novel of the contemporary American West, Spoon tells the story of Arcus Witherspoon, a mysterious half-black, half-Indian, oddly clairvoyant man searching the West for his roots. Hitchhiking near Hardin, Montana, Spoon falls in with a ranching family struggling to keep their ranch afl oat amidst the pressures of hard economic times and an encroaching coal company. Proving himself a gifted ranch hand and mentor, Spoon charges himself with rescuing the Darleys and guiding the family’s teenage son TJ on his path to manhood. While Spoon’s checkered past includes a prison stint and a navy tour of Vietnam,
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Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.
The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale which spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies and half-truths where the reader quickly finds it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction,
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“Men will want you like they want a glass of rum…One man will love you. But you won’t love him. You will destroy his life. The one you love will break your heart in two.”
So says the soothsayer, when predicting young Celia’s future. Raised in the tropics of Tobago by an aunt she loves and an uncle she fears, Celia has never felt that she belonged. When her uncle–a man the neighbors call Allah because he thinks himself mightier than God–does something unforgivable, Celia escapes to the bustling capital city.
There she quickly embraces her burgeoning independence,
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Casting Off:
1. Ending a knitted work.
2. Releasing lines holding a boat to its mooring.
3. Letting go…
Rebecca Moray leaps at the chance to leave the States and study Irish sweater-making on a tiny island off the coast of Galway. The town is so close-knit that everyone immediately knows of Rebecca and her daughter, Rowan, and why they are there. What they don’t know is that Rebecca’s really looking to escape an abusive relationship, one that perhaps a million miles can’t even heal….
Local fisherman Sean Morahan hates strangers—and people around town know to keep their distance,
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Hurry Down Sunshine is an extraordinary family story and a memoir of exceptional power. In it, Michael Greenberg recounts in vivid detail the remarkable summer when, at the age of fifteen, his daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally’s sudden visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city’s most sweltering months. It is a tale of a family broken open, then painstakingly, movingly stitched together again.
Among Greenberg’s unforgettable cast of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist,
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