About the Book Selected as a Best Book of the Year: Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Rocky Mountain News, Boston Phoenix “A delicate, everyday, even humorous love between mother and daughter is revealed as the grandest of passions.” —Nuala O’Faolain As she has in much of her stunning fiction, Edna [...]
Archive of posts tagged love
The Wasp Eater by William Lychack
“Deeply moving . . . In Lychack’s hands, the Cusslers’ plight is poignant . . . He portrays Daniel with such exquisite precision that the book succeeds not only as a story but also as a perfect window into a boy’s troubled heart.” — USA Today About the Book Set in an old Connecticut [...]
The Sugar Island by Ivonne Lamazares
“One day Mamá said life was about to start and ran off to the mountains to become a rebel guerrillera. No one knew exactly where she had gone until she came back pregnant a year later on a burro.” From that March day in 1958, shortly before her sixth birthday, Tanya del Carmen Casals [...]
Tolstoy Lied by Rachel Kadish
About the Book “An infectiously enjoyable novel…a love story with heft, weight and dazzle.” —Tova Mirvis “Cuts to the very core of what a love story should be: not about how we find happiness, but about what it means to do so.” — San Francisco Chronicle Rachel Kadish offers a take on modern love [...]
An Unfinished Season by Ward Just
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction, a New York Times Notable Book, and a Book Sense recommended title About the Book In An Unfinished Season, Ward Just brings us into the secret, shadow life that inhabits family, love, business, and politics in 1950s Chicago. In the small town [...]
Last Year's River by Allen Morris Jones
Questions for Discussion 1. The book’s title, Last Year’s River, is an obvious reference to the physical landscape in which the story is set; that is, the North Fork of the Shoshone. But flowing water—when conspicuously used in fiction—often points toward larger meanings, toward metaphorical conceits. What other themes can be read into the [...]
Featherstone by Kirsty Gunn
About Featherstone Kirsty Gunn’s first novel, Rain, was praised by the New York Times as “exquisitely written . . . Every page expresses familiar feelings in ways that are unsentimental and entirely original”; the same resonant magnetism and emotional depth infuse Featherstone, the story of the mysterious disappearance of a young woman from a [...]
Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
Downloadable Guide for Group Discussion and Classroom use “A marvellous achievement: supple, humane, ripe, generous and graceful.” — Bernard Levin, Sunday Times Offshore is set in the 1960s among the houseboats that rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on London’s Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, the boat owners, whose [...]
Pravda by Edward Docx
About the Book Inspired by the author’s own family history, Pravda is a haunting chronicle of suspicion and loss, love and loyalty, and the destructive legacy of deceit. Thirty-two-year-old Gabriel Clarke arrives in St. Petersburg from London to find his mother dead in her apartment. Reeling from grief, Gabriel and his twin Isabella bury [...]
Mademoiselle Benoir by Christine Conrad
“A lovely, lively novel . . . the letters in Mademoiselle Benoir crackle as they describe a love story of depth and power.” — Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of A Theory of Relativity and Deep End of the Ocean About the Book Having grown tired of the American lifestyle, mathematician Timothy Reinhart exchanges the bustling [...]
