Included in Library Journal’s “25 Key Indie Fiction Titles, Fall 2014-Winter 2015″
A meditation on memory and futility among the ruins of artistic ambition, family myth, and the fall of the South.
Savage’s latest novel dismantles the mythic greats of the past—an American South that never was, and a mother’s artistic pretensions that never should have been. In the story of Eve, Savage finds a voice that captures both the frustrations of our degraded world and the tender sympathy it evokes for all our sad efforts to leave something beautiful behind.
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“Elena Ferrante will blow you away.”—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
From one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on those tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else, as their friendship, beautifully rendered in its every detail, becomes a not always perfect shelter from hardship.
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A delightful tour through the intimate details of life in Victorian England, told by a historian who has cheerfully endured them all.
Ruth Goodman believes in getting her hands dirty. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Victorian conditions, Goodman serves as our bustling and fanciful guide to nineteenth-century life. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of the most perennially fascinating era of British history. From waking up to the rapping of a “knocker-upper man” on the window pane to lacing into a corset after a round of calisthenics,
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Kate Waithman thought she would only have one great love—her perfect husband, Patrick. But when Patrick is tragically killed in a car accident, Kate prepares for a life that is forever incomplete. Twelve years later, Kate has built an impressive career as a music therapist and is finally ready to move on with her fiance´e, Dan. Soon after their engagement, however, Kate starts to have startlingly vivid dreams about the life she would have had if Patrick survived. Even more troubling, some of the details in these dreams begin to translate to real life. There is only one piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit: a daughter,
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On the grubby outskirts of Paris, Grace restores bric-a-brac, mends teapots, re-sets gems. She calls herself Julie, says she’s from California, and slips back to a rented room at night. Regularly, furtively, she checks the hometown paper on the Internet. Home is Garland, Tennessee, and there, two young men have just been paroled. One, she married; the other, she’s in love with. Both were jailed for a crime that Grace herself planned in exacting detail. The heist went bad—but not before she was on a plane to Prague with a stolen canvas rolled in her bag. And so, in Paris,
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“It’s a good time of year for a party”.
Chicago winters are notoriously long, but for almost twenty years come January Lydia’s friends have gathered for a cherished ritual and blow-out evening. Their host’s annual party offers them good food, wine, and a much-needed dose of conviviality on what often “turned out to be the coldest night of the year” (p. 4). Only tonight, Lydia is preoccupied with something other than her famed spicy chicken stew.
Now fifty-four, Lydia was once an aspiring painter who taught art classes to pay the bills. After her position at a suburban community college became permanent,
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