Clare Burke has spent eighteen years, two of them in a maximum security prison, hoping to hear from her older sister, Anne [so it connects to her mention below] On a frigid morning in Montauk nearly two decades earlier, Clare’s attempt to rescue her sister from an abusive marriage went horribly wrong. It was the day Clare lost her freedom and her family—the day her life was shattered. After her release, Clare manages to put her life back together, resuming her nature writing and urban birding around New York City. Anne has since moved to Denmark, still with her husband and still too furious or too afraid to reach out to her sister.
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The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo,
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Scott and Maureen Torres-Thompson have always relied on others to run their Orange County home. But when bad investments crater their bank account, it all comes down to Araceli: their somewhat prickly Mexican maid. One night, an argument between the couple turns physical, and a misunderstanding leaves the children in Araceli’s care. Their parents unreachable, she takes them to central Los Angeles in the hopes of finding Scott’s estranged Mexican father—an earnest quest that soon becomes a colossal misadventure, with consequences that ripple through every strata of the sprawling city. The Barbarian Nurseries is a masterful tale of contemporary Los Angeles,
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In the tradition of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a gripping, generous, and provocative novel chronicling the grief that follows the death of a newborn—and leads to a family’s emotionally reawakening. Unable to express their grief over the loss of their newborn baby, John and Ricky Ryrie struggle to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and for their two older children. They pretend not only that little has changed, but that their marriage and their family have always been intact. Yet long suppressed uncertainties about their relationship come roiling to the surface, and a dreadful secret emerges with unexpected reverberations.
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The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure German princess who became one of the most remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in history. Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into empress of Russia by sheer determination. For thirty-four years, the government, foreign policy, cultural development, and welfare of the Russian people were in her hands. She dealt with domestic rebellion, foreign wars, and the tidal wave of political change and violence churned up by the French Revolution.
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For the Kellehers, Maine is a place where children run in packs, showers are taken outdoors, and old Irish songs are sung around a piano. As three generations of women arrive at the family’s beach house, each brings her own hopes and fears. Maggie is thirty-two and pregnant, waiting for the perfect moment to tell her imperfect boyfriend the news; Ann Marie, a Kelleher by marriage, is channeling her domestic frustration into a dollhouse obsession and an ill-advised crush; Kathleen, the black sheep, never wanted to set foot in the cottage again; and Alice, the matriarch at the center of it all,
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