My Latest Grievance stars the beguiling teenager Frederica Hatch, the “Eloise of Dewing College.” Born and raised in the dormitory of this small women’s college and chafing under the care of “the most annoyingly evenhanded parental team in the history of civilization,” Frederica is starting to feel that her life is stiflingly snug. That all changes with the arrival on campus of a new dorm mother, the glamorous Laura Lee French, the frenetic center of her own universe.
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,
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras Syndrome.
The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark’s accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition.
A Commonwealth Prize Winner
Celebrating the timeless power of storytelling, Mister Pip unites the stirring tale of a young girl’s quest for hope with a marvelous tribute to a Charles Dickens classic. Thirteen-year-old Matilda is coming of age on a Pacific island that has been torn apart by war. Almost everyone, including her father, has left to find work or escape the danger. Among those few who remain is the eccentric and mysterious Mr. Watts, the island’s sole remaining white man, who takes on the role of teacher and begins to read Great Expectations aloud to the students.
The Observations is a hugely assured and darkly funny debut set in nineteenth-century Scotland. Bessy Buckley, the novel’s heroine, is a cynical, wide-eyed, and tender fifteen-year-old Irish girl who takes a job as a maid in a once-grand country house outside Edinburgh, where all is not as it seems. Asked by her employer, the beautiful Arabella, to keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts, Bessy soon makes a troubling discovery and realizes that she has fled her difficult past only to arrive in an even more disturbing present.
A long overdue retelling of New Grub Street—George Gissing’s classic satire of the Victorian literary marketplace—Grub chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a group of young novelists living in and around New York City.
Eddie Renfros, on the brink of failure after his critically acclaimed first book, wants only to publish another novel and hang on to his beautiful wife, Amanda, who has her own literary ambitions and a bit of a roving eye. Among their circle are writers of every stripe—from the Machiavellian Jackson Miller to the ‘experimental writer’
