The Birthdays tells the story of a unique family on the brink of a new generation, and examines modern-day marriage, pregnancy, and parenthood.
On an island off the coast of Maine, the Miller family reunites to celebrate the father’s seventy-fifth birthday. Each of the adult children is expecting his or her own first child. The eldest, Daniel, grapples with the fact that his wife had to be artificially inseminated. Jake, the middle child, discovers that his wife is carrying twins after many years of infertility treatments. Hilary—the free-spirited youngest daughter—arrives in Maine five months pregnant with no identifiable father in sight.
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When the curtains are drawn back on the cabinet of wonders, every individual you meet is an original, the indelible mark of their uniqueness shaped in their flesh. Molly and Faye are spirited teenagers—and conjoined twins. Saffron is the Wolf Girl, her female form covered head to toe in fur. Alex/Alexandra is a seductive morphodite, her male/female parts irresistible to many.
To the rubes that pay good coin to see them, they are Freaks. To the other carnies—those who run the Ferris Wheel, the Girl Show, and more—they are the Starlight Carnival Royale’s most lucrative source of income,
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They were four women whom destiny threw together over a decade ago. Collectively, they experienced the extreme joys and deep sorrows that life offers up. From mundane moments to the dramatic and surreal, the authors have a history of six marriages, ten children, four stepchildren, six dogs, two miscarriages, two cats, a failed adoption, widowhood, and foster parenthood. They have built companies, lost companies, and sold companies. One of them was shot and left for dead on a tarmac in South America, and two lived through the deaths of spouses. Raising babies and teenagers together, they have known celebrity and success along with loneliness and self-doubt.
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Colin Scott reads people for a living. They bare their souls on paper, and he sells them to the highest bidder. His work as a top literary agent representing big name authors has turned his youthful ambitions into everything he ever wanted.
But Colin’s passion for molding new writers into proven talent has somehow become aggravating and routine. On top of this mounting cynicism and professional monotony, Colin and his wife are trying desperately to have a baby.
Every decision he has ever made now has a question mark after it. And his usually clear-cut motivations are leading toward a nervous breakdown.
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“Knowing was an ‘illumination.’ During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I’ve had these moments of ‘knowing’ one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet, these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die.” —Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook
“The two women were alone in the London flat.”
So begins Doris Lessing’s most famous novel,
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In this suspenseful and elegantly constructed novel, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed reveals the surprising connections among three people—the Bedouin, the orphan, and the eunuch—to tell a provocative tale of modern Saudi society. Combining an arresting immediacy in its realist mode with an aching poetry in its allegorical mode, and confounding stereotypical images of life in Saudi Arabia, Wolves of the Crescent Moon is a luminous and haunting novel of pain remembered and hope restored.
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