One late wine- and gossip-fueled night, four friends on a lark create a fateful test of friendship — one that challenges the very principles and boundaries of their alliance. To pass it means to never, at any cost, betray one another. Twenty years later, they must face that ultimate test.
We meet them at the dawn of their camaraderie in the 1980s and already each woman is distinguished from the other: Tamsin, the compassionate mother hen; Reagan, the brazen and clever overachiever; Sarah, the seemingly perfect beauty; and Freddie, who despite being far from her U.S. home, finds strength in her friends.
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Natalie and Tom have been best friends forever. But Tom wants more, and he’s going to prove to Natalie that they’re meant to be together. He makes a wildly romantic proposition: spend 26 weekends together, indulging in a different activity from A-Z. In six months, he argues, they will be desperately in love. The cautious Natalie – recently burned by a longtime boyfriend – isn’t so sure.
But Tom and Natalie aren’t the only ones coping with the vagaries of love. Natalie’s mother is going through her own personal crisis and Lucy, Tom’s unhappily married sister-in-law, yearns to give in to temptation.
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Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at Fayer Academy fifteen years ago. She has since become one of the best teachers the school has ever had. But Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. When she accepts an impulsive marriage proposal, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. The English Teacher is a passionate tale of a mother and son’s vital bond and a provocative look at our notions of intimacy, honesty, loyalty and the real meaning of home. A triumphant and masterful follow-up to her acclaimed,
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From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
A spare, lucid, and remarkably moving examination of the year following her husband’s sudden death just before their fortieth anniversary, The Year of Magical Thinking is the story of Didion’s search for answers, for relief, and above all for the chance to change the course of events.
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A mother’s memoir celebrates the joys and demands of raising a Down syndrome child.
From the moment she held him in her arms, Anne Crosby had deep fears for her newborn son. Although the staff at the hospital in London paid no attention to her concerns, her instincts were correct: Matthew had Down syndrome. After struggling with her contradictory feelings, Crosby set about doing whatever she could to help Matthew lead as full a life as possible. Matthew is the moving, honest, perceptive, and often funny account of the life he made with the help of his mother and many other caring people.
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Poignant and compelling, evocative and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India and witnessed through the lives of two compelling and achingly real women, the novel shows how the lives of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and vividly captures how the bonds of womanhood are pitted against the divisions of class and culture.
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