During the Christmas Truce of 1914, Hal Montgomery, a British soldier, is given a photo by a German soldier, Wilhelm Wetzlar, and they make a pact. Hal promises to find his enemy’s English girlfriend, Sam, and let her know her fiancé is alive and thinking of her. Several weeks later, Hal—now injured—is discharged from the army and goes to Stratford on Avon to fulfill his promise. But things take an unexpected turn when he meets the woman in the photo and falls in love with her himself. As their romance blossoms, Sam shares with Hal her most private confidence: Her newborn son is of German lineage,
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As an only child, Janet longs for a sister her parents are unable to give her. In kindergarten she meets Sophie, a strange and imaginative girl with a troubled family life. As friendship grows between the two girls, Janet believes her prayers have been answered, especially when members of her family embrace Sophie as one of their own.
Sophie’s troubles continue to follow her through high school, and Janet stands by her “sister” until, in adulthood, she learns of a devastating secret Sophie has kept from her. Janet’s world is turned upside down—and she discovers there may be a limit to what sisters should share.
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Welcome to Kittur, India. It’s on India’s southwestern coast, bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Kaliamma River to the south and east. It’s blessed with rich soil and scenic beauty, and it’s been around for centuries. Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste. And if the characters in Between the Assassinations are any indication, Kittur is an extraordinary crossroads of the brightest minds and the poorest morals, the up-and-coming and the downtrodden, and the poets and the prophets of an India that modern literature has rarely addressed.
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Meet Dahlia Finger: twenty-nine, depressed, whip-smart, occasionally affable, bracingly honest, resolutely single, and perennially unemployed. She spends her days stoned in front of the TV, watching the same movies repeatedly, like “a form of prayer.” But when Dahlia’s so-called life is upended by a terminal brain tumor, she must work toward reluctant emotional reckoning with the aid of a questionable self-help guide. Stunned, she obsessively revisits the myriad heartbreaks, disappointments, rages, and regrets that comprise the story of her life. With her take-no-prisoners perspective, her depressive humor, and her extreme vulnerability, Dahlia Finger walks a dazzling line between gravitas and irreverence,
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Tired of Provence in books, cuisine, and tablecloths? Exhausted from your armchair travels to Paris? Despairing of ever finding a place that speaks to you beyond reason? You are ripe for a journey to Brittany, where author Mark Greenside reluctantly travels, eats of the crêpes, and finds a second life.
When Mark Greenside—a native New Yorker living in California, doubting (not-as-trusting-as Thomas, downwardly mobile, political lefty, writer, and lifelong skeptic—is dragged by his girlfriend to a tiny Celtic village in Brittany at the westernmost edge of France, in Finistère, “the end of the world,” his life begins to change.
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Nan Powell is a free-spirited, sixty-five-year-old widow who’s not above skinny-dipping in her neighbors’ pools when they’re away and who dearly loves her Nantucket home. But when she discovers that the money she thought would last forever is dwindling, she realizes she must make drastic changes to save her beloved house. So Nan takes out an ad: Rooms to rent for the summer in a beautiful old Nantucket home with water views and direct access to the beach.
Slowly people start moving in to the house, filling it with noise, laughter,
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