“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,
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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,
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Mary Beth Latham has built her life around her family, around caring for her three teenage children and preserving the rituals of their daily life. When one of her sons becomes depressed, Mary Beth focuses on him, only to be blindsided by a shocking act of violence. What happens afterward is a testament to the power of a woman’s love and determination, and to the invisible lines of hope and healing that connect one human being to another. Ultimately, as rendered in Anna Quindlen’s mesmerizing prose, Every Last One is a novel about facing every last one of the things we fear the most,
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Susan Juby, already a reader-favorite YA author, makes her triumphant first foray into adult contemporary fiction with Home to Woefield, a hilarious, wildly original, and wonderfully insightful tale of no-so-ordinary life down on the farm. Told in four delightfully distinct narrative voices—a crusty 70-something farmer, a hair band-loving teen, a precocious 11-year old, and an earnest New Yorker in her 20s—Home to Woefield will enchant readers of all ages, as its motley cast struggles to avoid foreclosure with outlandish schemes and prize-winning chickens.
Prudence Burns, a well-intentioned New Yorker full of back-to-the-land ideals, just inherited Woefield Farm—thirty acres of scrubland,
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From the bestselling author of Red Azalea and Empress Orchid comes the poignant story of the friendship of a lifetime, based on the life of Pearl S. Buck.
Willow never dreamed that her childhood friend would become a world-renowned writer. In the impoverished Chinese village of Chin-kiang, a young pickpocket meets her match in Pearl Sydenstricker, the daughter of the village’s only white man, a Christian missionary named Absalom. Willow and her Papa befriend Pearl’s family to get a hot meal, but eventually Papa and Absalom become partners in recruiting the villagers to join the church.
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Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.
Soon to be made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells,
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