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Four unforgettable characters beckon you into this spellbinding new novel from Sue Miller. First among them is Wilhelmina Billy Gertz, small as a child, fiercely independent, powerfully committed to her work as a playwright. The story itself centers on The Lake Shore Limited, a play Billy has written about an imagined terrorist bombing of that train as it pulls into Union Station in Chicago, and about a man waiting to hear the fate of his estranged wife.
When Angela met Jason Powell while catering a dinner party in East Hampton, she assumed their romance would be a short-lived fling, like so many relationships between locals and summer visitors. To her surprise, Jason, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, had other plans, and they married the following summer. For Angela, the marriage turned out to be a chance to reboot her life. She and her son were finally able to move out of her mother's home to Manhattan, where no one knew about her tragic past.
In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped, for one beautiful, idyllic year, into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor.
Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for 15 years, Frankie Rowley has come home - home to the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Is it an accident, or arson? Over the weeks that follow, as Frankie comes to recognize her father’s slow failing and her mother’s desperation, another house burns, and then another, always the homes of summer people.
The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. The highly anticipated new memoir by bestselling author Glennon Doyle Melton tells the story of her journey of self-discovery after the implosion of her marriage. Just when Glennon Doyle Melton was beginning to feel she had it all figured out—three happy children, a doting spouse, and a writing career so successful that her first book catapulted to the top of the New York Times bestseller list—her husband revealed his infidelity and she was forced to realize that nothing was as it seemed.
Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.
Four unforgettable characters beckon you into this spellbinding new novel from Sue Miller. First among them is Wilhelmina Billy Gertz, small as a child, fiercely independent, powerfully committed to her work as a playwright. The story itself centers on The Lake Shore Limited, a play Billy has written about an imagined terrorist bombing of that train as it pulls into Union Station in Chicago, and about a man waiting to hear the fate of his estranged wife.
When Angela met Jason Powell while catering a dinner party in East Hampton, she assumed their romance would be a short-lived fling, like so many relationships between locals and summer visitors. To her surprise, Jason, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, had other plans, and they married the following summer. For Angela, the marriage turned out to be a chance to reboot her life. She and her son were finally able to move out of her mother's home to Manhattan, where no one knew about her tragic past.
In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped, for one beautiful, idyllic year, into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor.
Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for 15 years, Frankie Rowley has come home - home to the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Is it an accident, or arson? Over the weeks that follow, as Frankie comes to recognize her father’s slow failing and her mother’s desperation, another house burns, and then another, always the homes of summer people.
The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. The highly anticipated new memoir by bestselling author Glennon Doyle Melton tells the story of her journey of self-discovery after the implosion of her marriage. Just when Glennon Doyle Melton was beginning to feel she had it all figured out—three happy children, a doting spouse, and a writing career so successful that her first book catapulted to the top of the New York Times bestseller list—her husband revealed his infidelity and she was forced to realize that nothing was as it seemed.
Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.
As a young girl in Miller's Valley, an ordinary farming town that may be facing its final days, Mimi is observing adults, selling corn, growing up and changing, and watching the world around her change, too. As the years go by, the unthinkable starts to seem inevitable. Anna Quindlen's novel takes us through the changing eras of Mimi and her family, as secrets are revealed, and the heartbreaks of growing up and falling in love with the wrong man are overcome.
Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times best seller) returns to visit her siblings after 17 years of absence.
In I Almost Forgot About You, Dr. Georgia Young's wonderful life - great friends, family, and successful career - aren't enough to keep her from feeling stuck and restless. When she decides to make some major changes in her life, quitting her job as an optometrist and moving house, she finds herself on a wild journey that may or may not include a second chance at love.
In the summer of 1976, recently widowed and childless, Ora Lee Beckworth hires a homeless old black man to mow her lawn. The neighborhood children call him the Pee-can Man; their mothers call them inside whenever he appears. When the police chief's son is found stabbed to death near his camp, the man Ora knows as Eddie is arrested and charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, Ora sets out to tell the truth about the Pecan Man.
Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the mainstay of their lives. For 30 years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship: jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they've survived it all, until a single act of betrayal tears them apart...and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test.
Today is Ruth's first day of third grade at Dalton. The prestigious institution on New York's Upper East Side couldn't be more different from her old school in Harlem. Despite being the smartest girl in her grade, Ruth suspects that her classmates and teachers see only her dark skin. She also notices that Christina, the daughter of her mother's employer, treats Ruth very differently when they're hanging out with the popular girls rather than playing together. Ruth must navigate between two worlds.
When Kristin Chapman agrees to let her husband, Richard, host his brother's bachelor party, she expects a certain amount of debauchery. She brings their young daughter to Manhattan for the evening, leaving her Westchester home to the men and their hired entertainment. What she does not expect is this: bacchanalian drunkenness, her husband sharing a dangerously intimate moment in the guest room, and two women stabbing and killing their Russian bodyguards before driving off into the night.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore’s Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone....
Lucy and Owen, ambitious, thoroughly-therapized New Yorkers, have taken the plunge, trading in their crazy life in a cramped apartment for Beekman, a bucolic Hudson Valley exurb. They've got a 200-year-old house, an autistic son obsessed with the Titanic whose verbal ticks often sound like a broken record, and 17 chickens, at last count.
Ellen O’Farrell is a bit unusual. She’s a hypnotherapist. She’s never met her father. And she can’t seem to keep a relationship going. (Okay, that’s more normal that we want to admit.) When Ellen meets Patrick, she’s hopeful nevertheless. But when he says he needs to tell her something, she fears the worst. When Patrick reveals that his ex-girlfriend is stalking him, Ellen thinks, "Is that all?" She’s more intrigued than frightened. She’d love to meet her. What she doesn’t know is that she already has.
Kellie Scott has just returned to work after a decade of being a stay-at-home mom. She's adjusting to high heels, scrambling to cook dinner for her family after a day at the office - and soaking in the dangerous attention of a very handsome, very married male colleague. Kellie's neighbor, Susan Barrett, begins every day with fresh resolutions: She won't eat any carbs, she'll go to bed at a reasonable hour, and she'll stop stalking her ex-husband and his new girlfriend.
Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love.
Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation.
Delia Naughton, wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton, is Meri's new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Delia's husband's chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong.
What keeps people together, even in the midst of profound betrayal? How can a journey imperiled by, and sometimes indistinguishable from, compromise and disappointment culminate in healing and grace? Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, both reckoning with the contours and mysteries of marriage, one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun.
Here are all the things for which Sue Miller has always been beloved: the complexity of experience precisely rendered, the richness of character and emotion, and the superb economy of style, fused with an utterly engrossing story.
I was completely engaged by this story until the very disturbing ending, which made me feel cheated. The relationship between the two neighbors in the novel -- one a newlywed in her late 30s, the other a woman of about 75 who has had an unorthodox marriage to a prominent politician -- is very rich and compelling. The often irritating younger character, Meri (does this woman ever think of the consequences of anything she does?), blossoms within the friendship, and the older character, Delia, is fascinating -- as fiercely loyal as she is independent.
But what Miller decides to do with these women and their husbands at the end of the book is disturbing and distasteful -- without revealing the ending, I can say that I felt as if the time and energy I invested in these characters was wasted. I'm giving it three stars because parts of it are wonderful, but I honestly felt betrayed as a reader/listener at the end.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful
If this were only a basic tale of the devolution and redemption of two marriages and two women it would be enough, written with Sue Miller's skillful rendering of detail and sensitive exploration of emotional nuance. But Miller punctuates the situations with a moment of daring that is truly original, that elevates this novel from the realm of a simple still life into a powerful and affirming narrative that inspires and empowers. Brava!
13 of 14 people found this review helpful
I loved this book. It was similar in feel to "The Corrections" by Jonathan Fraizer.
The characters, ALL of the characters, while not always 'likable' are certainly human and behave in ways we have all witnessed people behave. Even the end, while I too was disappointed, it was, as the entire book was, true to life. I would have liked to have it end differently, but this book was telling its own story, and its characters had their own personalities and weaknesses. To have another kind of ending would not have been true to the characters or in keeping with the story. Life, as they say, is not fair.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful
I think I have read almost every book Sue Miller has written and she has done it again. Found a way to spin yet another story that is totally different from the others. Her knowledge of the feminine human heart is incredible and she portrays well the intricacies of relationships between men and women. I particularly liked the way she illustrated - diary style - a lifetime relationship between Tom, the senator, and his wife Delia seen through the eyes of Meri, their young neighbor and how Delia herself got to learn about a similar relationship to hers and Tom, that of Anne Apthorp through letters found after Anne's death. Couples' lives are much more than what you see from the surface. Great narration also on this book!
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
If you prefer to fall in love with the main characters of your novels, or at least really like them, than this won't be a great pick. There's a whole lot to dislike about the 2 women at the centre of this book and the questionable choices that bring them together, but it nevertheless makes for a great listen. The ending? Visceral. Wrenching. Perfect. You'll be thinking about this one long after its over.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Give me a break. I couldn't feel any real connection with the characters. Well, maybe I was pretty angry for the senator's wife. This is a novel about two husbands who are truly idiotic, unfeeling and self-centered and about the two women who accept these two imbeciles as their lot in life. The end was a drag.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
It was difficult for me to finish listening to this book. I thought this was partially because I invariably find stories of marital betrayal painful to listen to, regardless of the cause or the effect, and partially because the narrator's sing-song rendering of the initial narrative of tedium (however richly textured) just got on my nerves. But I'm very happy I did finish the book at last. The Senator's wife reads like a 10 hour short story in fact; a long, detailed, but hardly fascinating set up to a conclusion that is so impossibly honest it will leave you gasping for air. The final two hours are impossible to forsee and equally impossible to forget. A more shockingly naked portrayal of human sexuality you're not likely to find.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful
Hmmm, the book was a little slow however, when given the chance and a bit of patience, you can and w8ll be drawn into the different characters and their individual stories. I do t want to give it away so I should stop. It's a nice rainy day read or if your okay with a slow read. I enjoyed the story, i just wasn't ready for the twist.
This story is going to linger with me for a while. The author's chapters on infidelity are heart wrenching. I never foresaw the twist well, not until it was very near.
I liked both female leads, sometime we're so quick to judge others' marriages. But marriages are complex, none are the same and yet people love to judge them through some uniform code. I liked the looking glass Miller provided into these two marriages. But it is NOT a feel good book. Read at your own risk to your heart.
Love, love, love this book! I read it when it first came out and knew I had to listen to it as well. Blair Brown is a fantastic narrator. Loved the characters. I almost felt sorry for Deliah, but was annoyed that she let herself be a doormat for years to her Senator husband. Meri proved herself to be a spineless woman who snooped through Deliah's life. I would of thought that Meri's husband would have ditched her, but he stayed married to her...great book!