Sofie and her husband have decided to trade their Manhattan apartment for a house in Greenwich, Connecticut. But the oak-shaded streets are not the tranquil retreat that Sofie expected. When Julia, a member of Sofie’s new neighborhood book club, turns up dead, things get messy. Sofie discovers that everybody has something to hide, including her own husband.
As Sofie wades through a swamp of suburban secrets, it becomes clear that no one’s life is exactly what it seems to be. Priscilla has been married to Gordon for fifteen years, but the love left their marriage a long time ago.
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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.
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Life changes in an instant. On a foggy beach. In the seconds when Abby Mason—photographer, fiancée soon-to-be-stepmother—looks into her camera and commits her greatest error. Heartbreaking, uplifting, and beautifully told, here is the riveting tale of a family torn apart, of the search for the truth behind a child’s disappearance, and of one woman’s unwavering faith in the redemptive power of love—all made startlingly fresh through Michelle Richmond’s incandescent sensitivity and extraordinary insight.
Six-year-old Emma vanished into the thick San Francisco fog. Or into the heaving Pacific. Or somewhere just beyond: to a parking lot,
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In the beautifully written, multi-layered novel Plum Wine, Angela Davis-Gardner portrays the love story between Seiji, a Japanese potter who endured the terrors brought about by the Hiroshima bombing, and Barbara Jefferson, a lonely young American teaching English at an all-girls Tokyo university. This tale is much more than a romance; the narrative combines elements of mystery, culture, history, literature, and poetry in one woman’s life-altering journey through the recent past.
Plum Wine is set in Japan during the Vietnam War era. At the onset of the novel,
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Venice, 1202. Tens of thousands of crusaders set sail for Jerusalem to liberate the great city from Muslim rule. Among them is a British vagabond grudgingly taken under the wing of a pious knight who believes that the mission is truly blessed by God. Before leaving, the vagabond rescues a woman pretending to be an Arab princess, hoping that under the protection of his benefactor knight, he can smuggle the young woman back to the Holy Land. However, this “holy” campaign sinks into tragic moral turpitude – first in an attack on the Adriatic port city of Zara, and ultimately in the dramatic,
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When college sophomore Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont’s back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography and begins to work at a homeless shelter. It is there she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won’t let anyone see. But when Bobbie suddenly dies, Laurel discovers that before he was homeless, Bobbie Crocker was a successful photographer who had worked with such legends as Chuck Berry, Robert Frost, and Eartha Kitt. As Laurel’s fascination with Bobbie’s former life grows,
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