Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son,
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A gripping novel of two sisters who must reimagine the future-before they’re ready to let go of the past.
As a girl, Margot Winkler knew her big sister Lacey would keep her safe. Decades later, Lacey’s home is often Margot’s refuge. Lacey’s life has seemed close to perfect-a loving husband, twin daughters on the brink of womanhood, and a home filled with her beautiful hand-woven textiles. But everything changes when Lacey reveals some devastating news. A rare disease is slowly stealing her ability to use language. Now Margot must imagine the future and find the courage to help her sister discover a new voice,
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I didn’t know that people come into our lives, and sometimes, if we’re terribly lucky, we get the chance to love them, that sometimes they stay, that sometimes you can, truly, depend on them.
Cathie Beck was in her late thirties and finally able to exhale after a lifetime of just trying to get by. A teenage mother harboring vivid memories of her own hardscrabble childhood, Cathie had spent years doing whatever it took to give her children the stability—or at least the illusion of it—that she’d never had. More than that, through sheer will and determination,
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One day, at the age of thirty-one, Susan Richards realized that she was an alcoholic. She wrote it down in her journal, struck by the fact that it had taken nine years of waking up hung-over to name her illness. What had changed? Susan had a new horse, a spirited Morgan named Georgia, and, as she says: “It had something to do with Georgia. It had something to do with making a commitment as enormous as caring for a horse that might live as my companion for the next forty years. It had something to do with love.” Every day begins with a morning ride.
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In 2005, three years after our five-year-old daughter, Grace, died suddenly from a virulent form of strep, my husband, Lorne, our eleven-year-old son, Sam, and I found ourselves on a plane heading to China to adopt a baby girl. Our journey into adoption came from a belief that, even in such heartbreak and despair, we could love again. As soon as they placed eleven-month-old Annabelle in my arms, I knew that our hope of rebuilding our family again was indeed possible.
During the adoption process—the orientation, the miles of paperwork, the home visits, the long waits at the INS,
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Nancy writes medical newsletters for a living, but she’s begun to write a novel. Her book is based loosely on an important decision her father made in his youth, one that shaped his character from that point on, and also influenced his daughter as she made decisions about the course of her own life. This isn’t just a story she wants to write; it’s a story she must write, to honor her father and to work through her grief over his death.
So when she’s asked to join a writing group consisting of several prominent authors,
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