Blessed with beauty, talent, and a loving family, the Aschers seem to have it all. Joe and Laura are the toast of New York–a wildly successful playwright and a wealthy, well-educated actress. Then one winter night, seventeen-year-old Thomas dies, and the Aschers lose everything.
More than a decade later, as their daughter Emily’s wedding approaches, the family yearns to reconnect. But in order to do so, Joe, Laura, and Emily will first have to confront the tangle of blame, guilt, and long-held secrets that tore them apart.
Shifting between past and present over the course of sixteen years,
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In this poignant, evocative novel, bestselling author Holly Chamberlin sweeps you into the picturesque town of Ogunquit, Maine, where a family in flux explores their ties to a beautiful beach house, and to each other.
Some houses have a personality of their own. Larchmere is that kind of place—a splendid, sprawling home with breathtaking views that open to briny Atlantic air and seabirds’ calls. It’s the place where Tilda McQueen O’Connell grew up and now vacations each year, and where she and her three siblings—Adam, Hannah, and Craig—have gathered to commemorate the tenth anniversary of their mother’s passing.
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Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity. A marriage collapses under the strain of a daughter’s death; two bereaved siblings find comfort in one another; and an adopted young girl breathes new life into her family with her prodigious talent for the violin. As she writes with obvious affection for these unforgettable characters, Ayelet Waldman skillfully interweaves life’s finer pleasures—music and literature—with the more mundane joys of living.
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An award-winning journalist on a quest to save two orphans of war. Hala Jaber and her husband had spent ten years trying to conceive, only to resign themselves, finally, to a childless future.
Instead of being consumed by grief, they threw themselves into their work as journalists, making the decision to go to Baghdad to report on the coming war.
Jaber’s search for stories led her to two orphans at a children’s hospital: Zahra and Hawra. She fought passionately to help them- ultimately even trying to adopt them-before discovering that there is more than one way to love and raise a child,
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Not long after Rhoda Janzen turned forty, her world turned upside down. It was bad enough that her husband of fifteen years left her for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com, but that same week a car accident left her injured. Needing a place to rest and pick up the pieces of her life, Rhoda packed her bags, crossed the country, and returned to her quirky Mennonite family’s home, where she was welcomed back with open arms and offbeat advice. (Rhoda’s good-natured mother suggested she get over her heartbreak by dating her first cousin—he owned a tractor, see.)
Written with wry humor and huge personality—and tackling faith,
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Delilah Blue Lovett has always been a bit of an outsider, ever since her father moved her from Toronto to L.A. when she was eight, claiming Delilah’s mother no longer wanted to be part of their family. Twenty now and broke, but determined to be an artist like her errant mom, Delilah attends art class for free—by modeling nude at the front of the room, a decision that lifts the veil from her once insular world. While she struggles to find her talent, her father, her only real companion, is beginning to exhibit telltale signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s. And her mother,
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