They were four women whom destiny threw together over a decade ago. Collectively, they experienced the extreme joys and deep sorrows that life offers up. From mundane moments to the dramatic and surreal, the authors have a history of six marriages, ten children, four stepchildren, six dogs, two miscarriages, two cats, a failed adoption, widowhood, and foster parenthood. They have built companies, lost companies, and sold companies. One of them was shot and left for dead on a tarmac in South America, and two lived through the deaths of spouses. Raising babies and teenagers together, they have known celebrity and success along with loneliness and self-doubt.
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The first two novels in a dramatic trilogy set in eleventh-century France about the lives and loves of three daughters of the great Talmud scholar.
In 1068, the scholar Salomon ben Isaac returns home to Troyes, France, to take over the family winemaking business and embark on a path that will indelibly influence the Jewish world—writing the first Talmud commentary, and secretly teaching Talmud to his daughters.
Joheved, the eldest of his three girls, finds her mind and spirit awakened by religious study, but, knowing the risk, she must keep her passion for learning and prayer hidden.
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One of her wilder books, The View from Mount Joy begins as the narrator (and hero) Joe Andreson and his mother have moved down to Minneapolis from a small town in Northern Minnesota. He joins the Class of ’72 at Ole Bull High School and two of the girls he meets — Kristi Casey, the cheerleading captain who assumes the earth’s orbit is for her benefit, and Darva Pratt, who cares more about art and politics than her ranking on the popularity chart – will impact the rest of his life.
We follow Joe’s story as he graduates high school and college and tumbles into a life that includes an unchosen,
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In searching for the answers to life’s enduring questions, Kit Bakke sends an e-mail to her heroine, Louisa May Alcott and is amazed to receive a reply. Their correspondence – a mixture of biography, history and autobiography – becomes an intertwined dance of ideas and stories, bridging the mix-1800s and the twenty-first century. Together, they discuss issues of women’s rights, the obligation to help the sick and needy, and the moral and personal responsibility to resist injustice and initiate reform.
For Kit Bakke, Alcott is considerably more than the author of Little Women. “Her abolitionist zeal,
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The new novel from one of Ireland’s most prominent voices, The Gathering is an extraordinary anatomization of a family confronting the ghosts of its history.
A dazzling writer of international stature, Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a return to an intimate canvas and a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family haunted by the past.
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother,
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“Knowing was an ‘illumination.’ During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I’ve had these moments of ‘knowing’ one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet, these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die.” —Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook
“The two women were alone in the London flat.”
So begins Doris Lessing’s most famous novel,
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