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“A fast-paced, entertaining summer read” (People), The Why of Things is a “keenly observed” and “richly drawn” (The New York Times) novel about a family fighting towards hope in the wake of a terrible tragedy. Since the loss of her seventeen-year-old daughter less than a year ago, Joan Jacobs has struggled to keep her tight-knit family from coming apart. But Joan and Anders, her husband, are unable to snap back into the familiarity and warmth they so desperately need, both for themselves and for their surviving daughters, Eve and Eloise. The family flees to their summer home in search of peace and renewal, only to encounter an eerily similar tragedy when a pickup truck drives int...
Eleven-year-old Isabelle hasn't spoken in nine months, and as December begins the situation is getting desperate. Her mother has stopped work to devote herself to her daughter's care. Four psychiatrists have already given up on her, and her school will not take her back in the New Year. Her parents are frantically trying to understand what has happened so they can help their child, but they cannot escape the thought of darker possibilities. What if Isabelle is damaged beyond their reach? Will she never speak again? Is it their fault? As they spiral around Isabelle's impenetrable silence, she herself emerges as a bright young girl in need of help yet too terrified to ask for it. By the talented young author of FIREWORKS, this is a compelling, ultimately uplifting novel about a family in crisis, showing the delicate web that connects a husband and wife, parents and children, and how easily it can tear.
As the sun begins to set over Louisiana one October day in 1943, a young black man faces the final hours of his life: at midnight, eighteen-year-old Willie Jones will be executed by electric chair for raping a white girl - a crime some believe he did not commit. In a tale taut with tension, events unfold hour by hour from the perspectives of nine people involved. They include Willie himself, who knows what really happened, and his father, desperately trying to reach the town jail to see his son one last time; the prosecuting lawyer, haunted by being forced to seek the death penalty against his convictions, and his wife, who believes Willie to be innocent; the priest who has become a friend to Willie; and a mother whose only son is fighting in the Pacific, bent on befriending her black neighbours in defiance of her husband. In this exceptionally powerful novel, Elizabeth Winthrop explores matters of justice, racism and the death penalty in a fresh, subtle and profoundly affecting way. Her kaleidoscopic narrative allows us to inhabit the lives of her characters and see them for what they are - complex individuals, making fateful choices we might not condone, but can understand.
Hollis Clayton is in trouble. Still haunted by his small son's death, stalled in his writing career and over fond of the bottle, he finds himself abandoned by his wife for the summer - or, if he doesn't shape up, for good. But without his emotional anchor, Hollis continues to unravel. Besides, he's busy spying on the neighbours and sharing his meals with a stray dog. When is he going to find the time to get his life back on track? Here, in the daily rhythms of Hollis's disintegrating life, lies an evisceratingly comic portrait of suburban despair. With this deeply affecting tale of grief and renewal, Elizabeth H. Winthrop makes a striking debut.
The theme of loss is expressed or implied in much of Virginia Woolf's fiction and non-fiction, and one that resonates with the story of her own life, from her childhood, through her loss of family, and of friends, and of security in two World Wars, to her struggles with mental illness and her eventual suicide. And yet Virginia Woolf was, by all accounts, a lively and engaging woman, full of warmth, humor, maternal feeling (for her sister's children, as she had none of her own, passion, and exultation. She had a prodigiously active career, and she stood at the center of a large group of notable, engaged figures, many of them public intellectuals at the forefront of their generation, who were ...
Seven-year-old Che was abandoned by his radical Havard-student parents during the upheaval of the 1960s, and since then has been raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. He yearns to see or hear news of his famous outlaw parents, but his grandmother refuses to tell him anything. When a woman named Dial comes to collect Che, it seems his wish has come true: his mother has come back for him. But soon, they too are on the run, and Che is thrown into a world where nothing is what it seems.
Before there were bats like Shade, Marina or even Goth, there was a young chiropter—a small arboreal glider—named Dusk. . . . It is 65 million years ago, during a cataclysmic moment in the earth’s evolution, and Dusk, just months old, has no way of knowing he will play a pivotal role in creating a new world. What he does know is that he is different from the other newborn chiropters. Not content to use his large sails to glide down from the giant sequoia tree, Dusk discovers that if he flaps quickly enough, he can fly. But this strange gift that makes him feel like an outcast from the colony will also make him its saviour. After most of the colony is savagely massacred by the felids—...
"This book takes you through the collection gallery by gallery, illuminating the art and installations in each room"--From preface.
In the wake of a family tragedy, Joan and Anders Jacobs and their two daughters arrive for the summer at their holiday home in Massachusetts, only to find that a young man has drowned in the quarry on their land - was it an accident, suicide or murder? 15-year-old Eve becomes obsessed with proving foul play, but the mystery entwines each of the Jacobs in different ways, unexpectedly helping them to come to terms with their own loss and see the path forward.