From the New York Times bestselling author of Woman in Red comes an intimate story of friendship lost and regained, old loves rekindled, and a baptism by fire that ultimately leads to the redemption of three very special women.
It begins with a betrayal that tears apart childhood friends, Abigail and Lila, when Abigail’s mother, the housekeeper for Lila’s wealthy family, is summarily banished, casting Abigail from the only home she has ever known. Now, twenty-five years later, Abigail is a self-made successful cookbook author and TV personality. When Lila,
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On a stifling Christmas Eve in 1967 the lives of the McDonald children-Deborah, Robert, James, and Meredith-changed forever. Their mother, Rosemarie, told them she was running out to buy some lights for the tree. She never came back. The children were left with their father, and a gnawing question: why had their mother abandoned them?
Over the years, the four siblings have become practiced in concealing their pain, remaining close into adulthood, and forming their own families. But long-closed wounds are reopened when a chance encounter brings James face-to-face with Rosemarie after nearly forty years.
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Eve Brown, college diploma in hand and notions of saving the world in her head, was unsure about what to do with the rest of her life. Something noble…yet glamorous, she hoped. With some ambivalence she looked into joining the Peace Corps. When she fell for her dashing and altruistic Peace Corps recruiter, John, all the ambivalence disappeared. She absolutely had to join the Peace Corps, if for no other reason than to win John’s heart. Off to Ecuador she went—and after a year in the jungle, back to the States she ran, vowing to stay within easy reach of a decaf cappuccino for the rest of her life.
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At age twelve, Mende Nazer lost her childhood. It began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, setting fire to the village huts and murdering the adults. The raiders rounded up thirty-one young children, including Mende, who was eventually sold to a wealthy Arab family in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. So began Mende’s seven dark years of enslavement. Normally, Mende’s story never would have come to light, but when she was sent to work for another master—a diplomat working in London—she made a dramatic break for freedom.
Published to critical acclaim for the honesty and clarity of its prose,
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Perhaps it was because she was pregnant and hormones had eaten her brain that Judith O’Reilly was persuaded by her husband to leave London for the northern wilds. But pregnancy hadn’t addled her enough not to have a back-up plan: if life in the country didn’t measure up, the family would return to the city.
Far from home, Judith, a journalist and mother of three young children, discovers just how tough an assignment making a new life is. In the heart of the country, with no decent coffee in sight, Judith swaps high heels for rubber boots and media-darlings for evangelical strangers and farmers’
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When Susan Richards adopted an abused horse rescued by the local SPCA she didn’t know how Lay Me Down’s loving nature would touch her heart—and change her life.
Susan, a writing teacher, had lost her mother at the age of five and been abandoned by her father to uncaring relatives; she had an unhappy marriage ending in divorce and had self-medicated for anxiety (and grief and repressed anger) with alcohol. For more than a decade she had aspired to be a published writer but it was only with the memoir she wrote to honor Lay Me Down that she achieved this goal.
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