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;
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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,
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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.
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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,
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Nicole Mones transports readers to the fascinating world of elite cuisine in modern China with the story of an American food writer traveling in Beijing. Recently widowed Maggie MacElroy is unexpectedly called to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate. Shocked that he may have led a secret life, she immerses herself in work as a palliative. She is sent to profile Sam, a Chinese-American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the Imperial Palace. As he prepares an elaborate banquet as his audition for the Cultural Olympics, Maggie learns to appreciate the beauty and balance,
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Trespass is an ambitious intellectual thriller about a comfortable, cultivated American family forced into sudden proximity with the discomfiting, the lawless, and the wild—particularly the wildness of history.
Chloe Dale’s life is in good order. Her only child, Toby, has started his junior year at New York University; her husband, an academic on sabbatical, is working at home on his book about the Crusades; and Chloe is busy creating illustrations for a special edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Yet Chloe is disturbed—by the aggression of her government’s foreign policy, by the poacher who roams the land behind her studio punctuating her solitude with rifle fire,
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