Self-conscious and increasingly uncertain about her long-term plans, she’s studying a major that no longer interests her and is caught up in a bewildering affair with a married professor. In an impulsive attempt to redeem herself, she answers a want ad seeking a caregiver.What she finds is a wealthy, cultivated woman in her midthirties. Once an advertising executive, accomplished chef, and skilled decorator, Kate is now in the advanced stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). She and her husband, Evan, handle their situation with mordant humor, careful planning, and a lot of determination. Yet while Bec perceives the couple as charmingly frank and good-humored, strains exist beneath the surface.Bec is soon a vital part of her employer’s household, and their increasing closeness transforms both women’s lives and their relationships. The more she acts on Kate’s behalf, the further Bec strays from her stringent comfort zone. She performs every task, from the most administrative to the most intimate, and she translates Kate’s speech for strangers, friends, and even family. Sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes reluctantly, Bec advances further and further into Kate’s world, surprised by her own increasing dedication and ease. But how closely can Bec intertwine her own life with Kate’s?The two confront their obstacles unsentimentally, with dark humor and unflinching candor, as their relationship is slowly stripped of pretense. Honesty becomes their touchstone: They may find humor in the most devastating moments, but they won’t pretend to believe in silver linings that don’t exist. With crystal clarity, debut author Michelle Wildgen has crafted a deeply affecting novel about the singular relationship between two women, balancing humor and regret, sensuality and necessity, and testing the outer limits of friendship. Advance Praise for You’re Not You “Michelle Wildgen’s novel You Are Not You is so skillfully rendered that it’s hard to believe it is a first novel. The character of Bec, a twentysomething who has a habit of falling into things---jobs, love affairs---is funny, completely unsentimental, and really great for a reader to hang around with. Her worldview and how it changes when she goes to work for Kate, a refined woman in her thirties, is riveting. I simply couldn’t put this book down.”---Whitney Otto, author of How to Make an American Quilt “What an enjoyable and deeply satisfying novel. In You’re Not You, Michelle Wildgen manages to capture, in some extraordinary way, what it’s like to be a fairly ordinary college student, waiting for one’s life to begin. Bec is a wonderfully complex heroine, and the nuances of her relations with the remarkable Kate are both vivid and suspenseful. This is an exhilarating debut.”---Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona “With You’re Not You, Michelle Wildgen has produced an artful and slyly seductive debut novel about a caregiver in full thrall to her charge’s steely hold on sensuality, taste, and grace.”---Helen Schulman, author of P.S. “Michelle Wildgen writes with a lush, fierce clarity about the most private and complex of matters: the relationship between identity and intimacy, the body’s pleasures and profound betrayals, the sharp impact of loss, and the gifts of deep attachment. You’re Not You is startling and smart, a wise, beautiful novel.”---Nancy Reisman, author of The First Desire

    The story of an imposter and bigamist, who travels to the North where he marries the maid of Buttermere, a young woman whose natural beauty inspired the dreams and confirmed the theories of a=early 19th century writers.

    Mitford's most famous novels, "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate," satirize British aristocracy in the '20s and '30s through the amorous adventures of the Radletts, an exuberantly unconventional family closely modeled on Mitford's own.

    An absurdity. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop"), is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who has never before been caught and steals only for pleasure. Both art and the art of thievery have been part of his "endless effort at possession," but now he's pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well. Having recognized the "man-killing crevasse" that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it, he has stopped painting. And his last act of thievery - the last time he felt its "secret shiver of bliss" - has been discovered. The fact that the purloined possession was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend has compelled him to run away - from his mistress, his home, his wife; from whatever remains of his impulse to paint; and from a tragedy that has long haunted him - and to sequester himself in the house where he was born. Trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they have, excavating memories of family, of places he has called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him ("one of my eyes is forever turning towards the world beyond"), Olly reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself.

    Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in the Connecticut countryside, to the avenues of  Manhattan , and to the blue waters of Long Island Sound. Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. Ultimately, it falls to their grandson, Will, to solve the emotional puzzle of his family and of his own identity.

    Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional yardstick by which she has judged every man since.Are Laura and Ben brave enough to take this second chance at the lasting happiness fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the insidious need, instilled in childhood, to do the right thing?Patrick Gale’s thirteenth novel is a brief, even terse, love story, in which a man and a woman are reunited after a twenty-year interval and have a short taste of delight. It is also a novel about obligation. Both Laura and Ben have turned their lives upside-down in order to care for relatives, she for her cranky, brilliant mother, and he, for his gay younger brother who has Mosaic Down’s Syndrome.But the implication is that, while the caring is genuine, it is also ever so slightly an excuse for failures elsewhere in their lives…The novel takes its structure from a high summer day in Laura’s life in her mother’s house, from a rude awakening to a late-night nightcap in the garden after her mother has gone to bed. This progression through her day is interleaved with a parallel journey through Ben’s, as he copes with the complications of young Bobby’s late-flowering sexuality and the myriad half-truths told him by patients attending his venereology clinic. Only as the day progresses and the weather experienced by the characters sharply differs do we begin to wonder if all is what it seems.

    And that's the important bit. Real Life is about achievement, recognition, choices. It's about a boss who trusts you, a wardrobe that suits you, friends who support you and a relationship that fulfils you. It`s a mobile phone, an expense account, a company car and a place to park it. Happily Ever After. Unforunately, Real Life isn't working that way for The Temp. She's managed the university bit, but the job, the dough and the happily-ever-after seem harder than anybody ever told her. Living in Stockwell while she moves through a series of jobs ranging from the horrifying mindless to the bemusingly witless to the simply extraordinary, she realises that something isn't right. Who cares about a boss who trusts you? She'd settle for a boss who knows her name. This can't be Real Life, can it? Building on the success of her INDEPENDENT column, Serena Mackesy has created a wonderfully witty, acerbic exposé of office anthropology and a genuinely moving story about the early-twenties doldrums.

    For Kat and her friends, it offers an escape; a chance to drop out for a while, with lazy summer days by the lake and intimate winter evenings around the fire. But as the seasons change, tensions begin to rise and when an unexpected visitor appears at their door, nothing will be the same again.Three decades later, Lila arrives at the same remote cottage. With her marriage in crisis, she finds solace in renovating the tumbledown house. Little by little she wonders about the previous inhabitants. How did they manage in such isolation? Why did they leave in such a hurry, with their belongings still strewn about? Most disturbing of all, why can t she shake the feeling that someone might be watching her?The Shadow Year is a story of secrets, tragedy, lies and betrayal. It’s a tale that explores the light and dark of human relationships and the potential the past has to not only touch our present, but also to alter our future.

    With The Puzzle Bark Tree, Stephanie Gertler returns with a new novel showing her mastery at conveying the passion and power of the human spirit.Grace Hammond Barnett grew up in the emotionally desolate company of the strangers who were her mother and father. Her only happy memories are of the times spent with her younger sister, Melanie, and Jemma, the warm-hearted family housekeeper who helped fill the void left by Grace's detached, inaccessible parents. Now a mother herself, Grace feels trapped in a sterile marriage to a prominent surgeon and haunted by the recurrent dreams of drowning. Her only anchor is her cherished daughter, Kate.In the aftermath of her parents' sudden double suicide -- a tragedy that leaves Grace, Melanie, and Jemma reeling -- Grace is bequeathed a house she never knew existed. Leaving her penthouse in Manhattan on New Year's Eve, she travels alone to Sabbath Landing, New York, to a log cabin house on Canterbury Island, surrounded by Diamond Lake. Here, Grace meets Luke Keegan, a local fishing guide whose family history is inextricably bound to hers...and to a devastating secret buried in the cloudy memory of childhood.With compassion and elegance, Stephanie Gertler crafts an emotionally rich story of what it means to survive and thrive against all odds. Like its intricate, interlocking pieces that branch out to shape lives, The Puzzle Bark Tree plumbs the mysteries of the people we can never truly know...of the incomplete memories we carry with us, and the love that can make us whole.

    . . but what if your home is no longer there? Leaving her tiny flat in London -- and a whole host of headaches behind -- Lizzy Walter is making the familiar journey back home to spend Christmas with her chaotic but big-hearted family. In an ever-changing world, her parents' country home, Keeper House, is the one constant. But behind the mistletoe and mince pies, family secrets and rivalries lurk. And when David, the Love of Her Life -- or so she thought -- makes an unexpected reappearance, this one ranks as a Christmas she would definitely rather forget.As winter slowly turns to spring, all the things that Lizzy has taken for granted begin to shift. Keeper House is in jeopardy and might have to be sold for reasons Lizzy doesn't understand. Her family seems fractured like never before. And, with a new man in her life, she may finally have to kiss her dream of a reunion with David good-bye. By the time the Walters gather at Keeper House for a summer wedding, the stakes have never been higher -- for Lizzy, for her family, and for love.

    As an attractive girl, she soon catches the eye of the Prince of Wales and she in turn is captivated by his glamour and intensity.But careless talk causes trouble and soon Maria’s life takes a far darker turn. Disbelieved and dismissed she is thrown into a mental asylum, shut away from the real world with only her needlework for company.Can a beautiful quilt, discovered many years later, reveal the truth behind what happened to Maria?

    Her work as an actress has temporarily come to a halt. She believes there is no finer place to be "at liberty" than the sun-drenched isle of Corfu, the alleged locale for Shakespeare's The Tempest. Even the suspicious actions of the handsome, arrogant son of a famous actor cannot dampen her enthusiasm for this wonderland in the Ionian Sea.But the peaceful idyll does not last long. A series of incidents, seemingly unconnected - but all surrounded in mystery - throws Lucy's life into a dangerous spin, as fear, danger and death - as well as romance - supplant the former tranquility. Then a human corpse is carried ashore on the incoming tide... And without warning, she found she had stumbled into a nightmare of strange violence, stalked by shadows of terror and sudden death.

    Book 1 in this contemporary series features Heather, a winsome blonde whose looks belie her black belt in karate. When Heather meets Tyler, the society page editor, they are immediately attracted to each other, despite her parents' objections.When Houston's mayor is shot, the Debutantes solve the case. To remain anonymous, they leave the perfume-laden evidence at the newspaper...along with a long-stemmed rose. Obsessed with the mysterious woman now known as "The Rose," Tyler breaks up with Heather. As she and her friends work on solving yet another crime, Heather is determined to win Tyler's heart. Will she overcome his mystery-woman fascination? Can the Debutantes keep their identities hidden? "Heather" an intriguing storythat engages mind and heart

    The elder Blythe sisters are twins and have spent most of their lives looking after the third and youngest sister, Juniper, who hasn’t been the same since her fiance jilted her in 1941. Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Milderhurst, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in ‘the distant hours’ of the past has been waiting a long time for someone to find it. Morton once again enthralls readers with an atmospheric story featuring unforgettable characters beset by love and circumstance and haunted by memory, that reminds us of the rich power of storytelling.

    Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.