Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, casual acquaintances during their university years, spend graduation night together. It’s July 15, 1988, and their futures are up in the air. Dexter, the handsome, confident son of a well-to-do family, knows only that he wants “to be successful. . . . to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications” [p. 9]. Emma is determined to stay true to her left-leaning passions and ideals though she has little idea of how she’ll do it. They part the next day with vague promises to keep in touch as Dexter sets off to travel the world and Emma returns to her working-class family in Leeds to figure out what she’ll do next.
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It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly’s possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many phases of her friendship with Molly and their college friend Andrew, and comes to wonder whether they really knew each other at all. She revisits the intense closeness of their early days, the transformations they each made in the name of success and security, the lies they told each other, and betrayals they never acknowledged.
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Asked to name her favorite book, sixteen-year-old Carley Wells answers, “never met one I liked.” Her parents are horrified and decide to commission a book to be written just for her. They will be the Medicis of Long Island and buy their daughter The Love of Reading. At first, Carley’s sole interest in the project is to distract Hunter, the young bibliophile she adores. But as Hunter’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic, Carley begins to understand the importance of stories-and how they are powerful enough to destroy a person. Or save her.
Tanya Egan Gibson’s debut novel is an irresistible work of metafiction that dazzlingly embeds a book within the book,
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In the summer of 1969, Seth Shapiro is twelve years old, and the personal tumult of his and his family’s lives plays out against the backdrop of the moon landing and Woodstock. Seth lives with his unstable mother, Ruth, his twin sister, Sarah, and his younger brother, Seamus, in a two-bedroom apartment in northern New Jersey. His father, a wealthy doctor, lives with his young French wife in a ten-room house and has no interest in Seth and his siblings. Seth is dying to escape from his mother’s craziness and often suffocating love for her children, her marriage to a man she’s known for two weeks,
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From the award-winning author of The Four Seasons comes a sumptuous novel that retells The Odyssey from the point of view of Xanthe—the daughter Odysseus didn’t know existed…
Xanthe is the brave, beautiful daughter of Odysseus and Penelope—and potential heir to the throne of Ithaca. But the royal court is in upheaval. A battle is being waged inside the palace, and upstairs, Xanthe is barricaded in her chambers—her only protection against the rapacious suitors who will do anything to become king, even if it means murdering her brother and abducting her as their bride.
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They were born on the same day, in the same small New Hampshire hospital, into families that could hardly have been less alike.
Ruth Plank is an artist and a romantic with a rich, passionate, imaginative life. The last of five girls born to a gentle, caring farmer and his stolid wife, she yearns to soar beyond the confines of the land that has been her family’s birthright for generations.
Dana Dickerson is a scientist and realist whose faith is firmly planted in the natural world. Raised by a pair of capricious drifters who waste their lives on failed dreams,
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