Small wonder that, at nine years old, Monica Holloway develops a fascination with the local funeral home. With a father who drives his Ford pickup with a Kodak movie camera sitting shotgun just in case he sees an accident, and whose home movies feature more footage of disasters than of his children, Monica is primed to become a morbid child.
Yet in spite of her father’s bouts of violence and abuse, her mother’s selfishness and prim denial, and her siblings’ personal battles and betrayals, Monica never succumbs to despair. Instead, she forges her own way,
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In the small town of Stone Creek, a random encounter offers two lonely people a chance at happiness.
Danny, a young widower, still grieves for his late wife, but for the sake of his five-year-old son, Caleb, he knows he must move on. Alone in her summer house, Lily has left her workaholic husband, Paul, to his long hours and late nights back in the city. In Stone Creek, she can yearn in solitude for the treasure she’s been denied: a child.
What occurs when Lily and Danny meet is immediate and undeniable—despite Lily being ten years older and married.
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When Susan Richards adopted an abused horse rescued by the local SPCA she didn’t know how Lay Me Down’s loving nature would touch her heart—and change her life.
Susan, a writing teacher, had lost her mother at the age of five and been abandoned by her father to uncaring relatives; she had an unhappy marriage ending in divorce and had self-medicated for anxiety (and grief and repressed anger) with alcohol. For more than a decade she had aspired to be a published writer but it was only with the memoir she wrote to honor Lay Me Down that she achieved this goal.
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Forty-two and divorced, Holli Templeton has begun to realize the pleasures of owning her life for the first time. But when she learns that her son Conner has unexpectedly fled college and moved to Texas with his troubled girlfriend Kilian, and she begins to note signs of decline in her beloved grandmother, Holli realizes she must once again put her family’s needs before her own. As if that’s not enough, Holli notices signs of serious decline in the beloved Texas grandmother who raised her. She has no choice but to leave the comfort zone of life in New York and return to her hometown in Texas to care for the people she loves.
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In 1962, Florence and Edward celebrate their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their marital duties weighs over them. And unbeknownst to both, the decisions they make this night will resonate throughout their lives. With exquisite prose, Ian McEwan creates in On Chesil Beach a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
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From the celebrated author of the international bestseller Suite Française, a newly discovered novel, a story of passion and long-kept secrets, set against the background of a rural French village in the years before World War II.
Written in 1941, Fire in the Blood – only now assembled in its entirety – teems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years before the war, when “peace” was less important as a political state than as a coveted personal condition: the untroubled pinnacle of happiness. At the center of the novel is Silvio,
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