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.
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,
Artist Miranda Jones loves her new life in the picturesque coastal town of Milford-Haven. But her own childhood issues begin to haunt her, even as the secrets of Milford-Haven, buried deep in the sands of the past, begin to surface. Probing the Central Coast for missing reporter Chris Christian, Deputy Delmar Johnson finds a significant clue. The Cove seems to hold a memory for Zack Calvin, but just hours after his romance with Miranda Jones ignites, his life is endangered by a powerful underwater explosion off the Santa Barbara coastline. Meanwhile Sally O’Mally flees Milford-Haven to decide the fate of her unborn child;
Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter.
At age eighteen, sick of her notoriety as “the girl in the pictures,” Clara fled New York City, settling and making her own family in small-town Maine. But years later, when Ruth reaches out from her deathbed, Clara suddenly finds herself drawn back to the past she thought she had escaped. From the beloved author of Family History and Slow Motion,
Lemaster Carlyle, the president of the country’s most prestigious university, and his wife, Julie, the divinity school’s deputy dean, are America’s most prominent and powerful African American couple. Driving home through a swirling blizzard late one night, the couple skids off the road. Near the sight of their accident they discover a dead body. To her horror, Julia recognizes the body as a prominent academic and one of her former lovers. In the wake of the death, the icy veneer of their town Elm Harbor, a place Julie calls “the heart of whiteness,” begins to crack, having devastating consequences for a prominent local family and sending shock waves all the way to the White House.
Ann Packer’s new novel centers around two childhood friends, Liz and Sarabeth, as they navigate the challenges of their lives as adults, confront loneliness and near tragedy, and test both the limits and the redemptive power of their friendship.
Songs Without Words is a novel about friendship and about family, but it is also very much about suicide. Sarabeth remarks that Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, which she is reading at a retirement home, are not so much about adultery as about suicide. Adultery is an issue,
