It’s not easy being the Queen of Broken Hearts. Just ask Clare, who has willingly assumed the mantle while her career as a divorce coach thrives. Now she’s preparing to open a permanent home for the retreats she leads, on a slice of breathtaking property on the Alabama coast owned by her mother-in-law. Make that former mother-in-law, a colorful eccentric who teaches Clare much about love and sacrifice and living freely. When Clare’s marriage ends in tragedy, her work becomes the sole focus of her life. While Clare has no problem helping the hundreds of men and women who seek her advice to mend their broken hearts,
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Meredith Hall’s moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her.
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Devils in the Sugar Shop is the story of a group of women friends in Omaha who are struggling with various romantic troubles and who are all about to convene for a pre-Valentine’s Tupperware-like home party for “marital aids.” The evening, meant to be a lark, changes how they each view their lives and relationships—and not just their romances but also their friendships and relationships with their children. With his characteristic touch, Schaffert places an unusual cast in unusual circumstances and creates a comic tale that is similar to Tales of the City, or even a cross between “Sex and the City”
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When figurative painter Jeffrey Finelli is run over by a cab in front of the Simon Pryce Gallery on the night of his first opening, the art world falls all over itself for a piece of the instantly in-demand work by the late “emerging artist.” At the center of the show is an enormous painting called Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him that becomes the object of most desire. As the artist philosophically muses before meeting his untimely end, “It represents the creative endeavor.”
After Finelli’s death, the gallery receptionist, aspiring artist and protagonist Mia McMurray,
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Far from her family, her country, and her home and thrust into the role of woman, wife, and queen at the age of 14, Marie Antoinette lived a brief but astonishing existence. With searing insight and wondrous narrative skill, Sena Jeter Naslund offers a fresh, vivid picture of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. Based on impeccable historical research, Abundance reveals a young woman very different from the one who supposedly said of the starving French peasants, “Let them eat cake.”
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In this enchanting story of love, marriage, and mutual understanding, few readers have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet. Her early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy—who is quite the most handsome and eligible bachelor in the whole of English literature—is a misjudgment only matched in folly by Darcy’s arrogant pride. In Pride and Prejudice, first impressions give way to truer feelings in a comedy profoundly concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved.
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