Showing results by author "Sue Miller" in All Categories

Graham and Annie have been married for nearly 30 years. A golden couple, their seemingly effortless devotion has long been the envy of their circle of friends and acquaintances. Graham is a bookseller and a big, gregarious man with large appetites - curious, eager to please, a lover of life, and the convivial host of frequent, lively parties at his and Annie’s comfortable house in Cambridge. Annie, more reserved and introspective, is a photographer. 

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.

The whole world could not have broken the spirit and strength of the Eberhardt family of 1948. Lainey is a wonderful if slightly eccentric mother. David is a good father, sometimes sarcastic, always cool-tempered. Two wonderful children round out the perfect picture. Then the third child arrives - and life is never the same again. Over the next 40 years, the Eberhardt family struggles to live with a flood tide of upheaval and heartbreak, love and betrayal, passion and pain...hoping they can someday heal their hearts.  

After an amicable divorce, piano teacher Anna Dunlap has built an independent life in New England for herself and her four-year-old daughter, Molly. It's all Anna thinks she needs. Until she meets Leo Cutter, an artist who makes her feel desired, unabashedly sexual, and filled with certitude and passion for the first time. All it takes is a single unguarded moment for Anna's perfect world to implode.

Eva, a divorced and happily remarried mother of three, runs a small bookstore in a town north of San Francisco. When her second husband, John, is killed in a car accident, her family's fragile peace is once again overtaken by loss.

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.

This stunning new novel showcases Sue Miller's singular gift for exposing the nerves that lie hidden in marriages and families, and the hopes and regrets that lie buried in the hearts of women.

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.

This book provides the foundation for any church to develop a thriving childrens ministry by giving step-by-step guidance and creative application exercises based on Willow Creeks successful Promiseland ministry and other successful children's ministries from around the world.

After years of lives lived apart, Lottie Gardner, her brother, Cameron, and their old friend Elizabeth reunite in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lottie has arrived to settle the estate of her elderly mother in decline. It's also a chance to slip away from a passionless marriage in jeopardy. What she longs for is the kind of heedless romance she sees in her brother's rekindled fling with his childhood sweetheart. But Elizabeth is in the throes of a marital crisis of her own. Then blind desire culminates in a senseless tragedy.

Lily Maynard is proud, chilly, difficult, and has become a famous writer at age 72. Now, stricken with Parkinson's disease and staying with her architect son Alan, Lily must cope with her fading powers as well as with disturbing memories of the events that estranged her from her children and ended her marriage. For Alan, her visit raises old questions about his relationship with her, about the choices he has made in his own life, and about the nature of love, disappointment, and grief. 

Annie is not the first love of Graham’s life but she is, he thinks, his last and greatest. Very recently, he has faltered; but he means to put it right. Here they are in marriage, in late middle age, in comfort. Mismatched, and yet so well matched: the bookseller with his appetite, his conviviality, his bigness; the photographer with her delicacy, her astuteness, her reserve. The children are offstage, grown up and scattered on either coast; Graham’s first wife, Frieda, is peaceably in their lives, but not between them. 

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.

In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was, she claims, perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself, and grapples with the haunting memories of those final months and the larger narrative of her father's life.

Poe-Ish Tales Forevermore is a mini-anthology containing four short stories inspired by the works and life of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s stories and poems have stood the test of time, and have been studied and enjoyed by generations of admirers. The stories in this anthology were crafted as a tribute to the inspiration that is Edgar Allan Poe.

The fascinating stories featured in Inventing the Abbotts explore the treacherously shifting ground of erotic and family relationships. In the title story, a young man takes up successively with three daughters of the most fashionable family in town. Others concern a young girl in the first blush of sexual curiosity, and a stricken dowager whose seizures release a brutal and sometimes obscene candor. 

Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that’s dear to you… Thirty years ago Jo Becker’s bohemian life ended when she found her best friend brutally murdered. Now Jo had everything: work she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters and a beautiful home.

Michelle & Sue are friends and mums in business. While the pandemic has changed our world, we can still share, inspire and network with you through our podcast. We're making time for conversation and topics that are relevant to you as a mum, a wife and a woman in business. Or if you're none of these - we welcome you too! We're chatting about life.