At twenty Cassie Madison left her hometown of Walton, Georgia, for New York City, where she has reinvented herself-from losing herself in her career to squashing her accent. But one night a single phone call brings back everything she’s tried to forget. She hasn’t spoken to her sister since Harriet stole Cassie’s fiancé and married him. But now Harriet’s on the line with news that their father is dying.
As she makes the trip back, the only thing that frightens Cassie more than losing her father is seeing Harriet and the family that should have been hers.
read more
In his beguiling and powerful new novel, the award-winning author of Dancing in the Lowcountry serves up a story of friendship, Southern food, dreams, and determination.
Loretta Crawford grew up in a family where lives are small and appetites are big, and where the cure for what ails you can usually be found in a plate of hot biscuits or a slice of rich pound cake. The results show all too clearly on her 5’4″, 280-pound frame. Until one day, Loretta realizes she’s had enough—enough of her mama’s sugarcoated putdowns and of feeling unattractive, and enough of being called “Bubbles”
read more
Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is also a voracious reader. He has for years kept a notebook in which he notes words or phrases, just from a love of language. But reading for him is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off-hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that reading has saved his life, and if not his life then surely his sanity.
In My Reading Life, Conroy revisits a life of passionate reading. He includes wonderful anecdotes from his school days,
read more
What makes and unmakes a Jew? Julian Treslove, a middle-aged bachelor in London, grew up knowing just one Jew: his friend and rival Sam Finkler. Treslove secretly calls all Jews “Finklers” and wonders if he’ll ever understand “Finkler” humor or Middle East politics. While Treslove works as a celebrity double at parties, Sam Finkler is a celebrity—a pop philosopher, television personality, and bestselling author of self-help books. One night, Treslove and Finkler visit their mutual friend Libor Sevcik, a ninety-year-old Czech Jew. Finkler and Libor lost their wives in the same month, and now Treslove feels doubly excluded—he’s not a Finkler or a widower.
read more
David Carter is an obsessive collector, and the curator of the local history museum. In addition to overseeing the community’s archives, he has, since boyhood, diligently archived the items that tell his own life story: birth certificate, school report cards, movie and train tickets. But when a senile relative lets slip a long-buried family secret, David is forced to consider that his whole carefully cataloged life may be constructed around a lie. In fits and starts, his world begins to unravel.
read more
Sebastian Prendergast lives with his eccentric grandmother in a geodesic dome. His homeschooling has taught him much-but he’s learned little about girls, junk food, or loud, angry music. Then fate casts Sebastian out of the dome, and he finds a different kind of tutor in Jared Whitcomb: a chain-smoking sixteen-year-old heart transplant recipient who teaches him the ways of rebellion. Together they form a punk band and plan to take the local church talent show by storm. But when his grandmother calls him back to the futurist life she has planned for him, he must decide whether to answer the call-or start a future of his own.
read more
