Like Frankenstein and Dracula, Jane Eyre is a Victorian novel that has passed into common consciousness and proved remarkably adaptable, generating several film and stage versions. That Jane Eyre shares this fate with the two greatest horror novels of the nineteenth century is instructive. Like them, it speaks to deep, timeless human urges and fears, using the conventions of Gothic literature to chart the mind’s recesses.
The detailed exploration of a strong female character’s consciousness has made readers in recent decades consider Jane Eyre as an influential feminist text.
read more
Kisses, even the ones that don’t happen, can be the trace of what’s constant when life changes. In childhood, when what seems to define everything is competition—for style, for knowing, for experience—a kiss is the first first. When a girl’s father moves out and chooses a new family, a kiss on the head from him may be the trace of constancy that she wants most.
Later, such things take on a different flavor. Sometimes the kiss she wants doesn’t come. Sometimes the one she wouldn’t have is forced upon her. From time to time, the one she has kissed before is lost to her.
read more
Author Cindy Jones has a gift for the millions of readers everywhere who have been enchanted by Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and the other wondrous works of the inimitable Austen—not to mention fans of more contemporary delights such as The Jane Austen Book Club. Jones’s My Jane Austen Summer is a delightful, funny, poignant novel in which a contemporary woman—an obsessed Austenphile—learns much about life, love, and herself during one magical summer in England spent re-enacting Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
Lily has squeezed herself into undersized relationships all her life,
read more
Somer’s life is everything she imagined it would be—she’s newly married and has started her career as a physician in San Francisco—until she makes the devastating discovery she never will be able to have children.
The same year in India, a poor mother makes the heartbreaking choice to save her newborn daughter’s life by giving her away. It is a decision that will haunt Kavita for the rest of her life, and cause a ripple effect that travels across the world and back again.
Asha, adopted out of a Mumbai orphanage, is the child that binds the destinies of these two women.
read more
“Happy birthday? My pig-farmer boyfriend was in absentia, the county sheriff was the current cause of some very naughty thoughts, my drunk sister-in-law was passed out at my kitchen table, and my dead mother had sent balloons. What else could a girl want?”
On the occasion of her 46th birthday, Caroline Wimbley Levine is concerned about filling the large shoes of her late, force-of-nature mother, Miss Lavinia, the former Queen of Tall Pines Plantation. Still, Caroline loves a challenge—and she simply will not be fazed by the myriad family catastrophes surrounding her. She’ll deal with brother Trip’s tricky romantic entanglements,
read more
From Brunonia Barry, the New York Times bestselling author of The Lace Reader, comes an emotionally compelling novel about finding your true place in the world.
A respected Boston psychotherapist, Zee Finch has come a long way from a motherless childhood spent stealing boats. But the actions of a patient throw Zee into emotional chaos and take her back to places she thought she’d left behind.
What starts as a brief visit home to Salem begins a larger journey. Suddenly having to care for her ailing father after his longtime companion moves out,
read more
