With four young daughters and a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves halfway across the country to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her daughters. The two oldest, Amanda, 15, and Stephanie, 13, have a symbiotic relationship so intense they barely know where one begins and the other leaves off. They come to blame their mother for their family’s dislocation and one day the two run off together—to the streets of their own city, then San Francisco, then utterly gone.
Faced with the unraveling of the family she thought she could hold together through blind love,
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Casting Off:
1. Ending a knitted work.
2. Releasing lines holding a boat to its mooring.
3. Letting go…
Rebecca Moray leaps at the chance to leave the States and study Irish sweater-making on a tiny island off the coast of Galway. The town is so close-knit that everyone immediately knows of Rebecca and her daughter, Rowan, and why they are there. What they don’t know is that Rebecca’s really looking to escape an abusive relationship, one that perhaps a million miles can’t even heal….
Local fisherman Sean Morahan hates strangers—and people around town know to keep their distance,
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Sarah Lucas imagined the rest of her days would be spent living peacefully in her rural Vermont home, in the steadfast company of her husband. But after Charles dies suddenly, seventy-five-year-old Sarah is left inconsolably alone—until a variety of wayward souls come seeking shelter in her big, empty home. As Sarah and this unruly flock form a family of sorts, they nurture and protect one another, discovering their unsuspected strengths and courage.
In the tradition of Jane Smiley and Sue Miller, Kate Maloy has crafted a wise and gratifying novel about a woman who gracefully accepts a surprising new role just when she thinks her best years are behind her.
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“You can always start again,” Kate Robinson’s mother once told her, “all it takes is a new thread.” Overwhelmed by heartbreak and loss, the struggling twenty-six-year-old fashion designer follows her mother’s advice and flees to her ancestral homeland of Ireland, hoping to break free of old patterns and reinvent herself.
She arrives on the west coast, in the seaside hamlet of Glenmara. In this charming, fading Gaelic village, Kate quickly develops a bond with members of the local lace-making society: Bernie, alone and yearning for a new purpose since the death of her beloved husband,
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In August 2004, Gesine Bullock-Prado left behind a high-powered life in Hollywood, where she had run a production company with her sister, actress Sandra Bullock. She began a new chapter in the opposite corner of America, opening a bakery in the smallest state capital in the country: Montpelier, Vermont. Trading her designer suits and imported shoes for sweatpants and mismatched socks, she embraced her true destiny, launching a production company of another sort: a gem called Gesine Confectionary, where each morning at 4 a.m., she was able to revel in the joy of baking.
Celebrating her once-secret hobby,
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Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing — and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing’s timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.
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