Just as Jane Austen delighted readers with wise heroines and surprising turns of fate, Cathleen Schine delivers a world of wry insight in each of her novels. With The Three Weissmanns of Westport, she brings Sense and Sensibility to modern-day Connecticut, where Betty Weissmann and her two middle-aged daughters have begun living as exiles. At age seventy-five, Betty has been dumped by her husband of nearly fifty years. He and his mistress have set up housekeeping in the sumptuous Manhattan apartment that Betty had called home for most of her adult life. Her daughter Miranda—a tough-as-nails literary agent—is facing bankruptcy after a series of scandals.
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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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The Gold Rush has taken hold of the Wild West. Pioneers from around the country congregate in makeshift settlements like Motherlode in hopes of striking it rich. It’s here that Alex, disguised as a boy and on the run from her troubled past, is able to blend in among the rough and tumble prospectors living on little more than adrenaline and moonshine.
Emaline, the formidable proprietor of the Wayside Inn, provides food, drink and other bodily comforts for the men who pass through. She knows there’s something different about Alex, the shy, slight boy who doesn’t talk much.
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A miraculous lesson in courage and recovery, Bending Toward the Sun tells the story of a unique family bond forged in the wake of brutal terror.
Rita Lurie was five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland to hide from the Nazis in a cramped, dark attic with fourteen members of her family. Young Rita watched her younger brother and her mother die before her eyes. But the tragedy of the Holocaust was only the beginning of Rita’s story.
Decades later, Rita’s daughter Leslie began probing the traumatic events of her mother’s childhood to discover how Rita’s pain has affected not only Leslie’s life and outlook but that of her own daughter,
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