Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

From the Back Cover "The most significant and triumphant work that Lewis has...produced."-- New York Herald Tribune In this timeless tale of two mortal princesses--one beautiful and one unattractive--C.S. Lewis reworks the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche into an enduring piece of contemporary fiction. This is the story of Orual, Psyche's embittered and ugly older sister, who possessively and harmfully loves Psyche. Much to Orual's frustration, Psyche is loved by Cupid, the god of love himself, setting the troubled Orual on a path of moral development. Set against the backdrop of Glome, a barbaric, pre-Christian world, the struggles between sacred and profane love are illuminated as Orual learns that we cannot understand the intent of the gods "till we have faces" and sincerity in our souls and selves.   "In Mr. Lewis's sensitive hands the ancient myth retains its fascination while being endowed with new meanings, new depths, new terrors."-- Saturday Review C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) gained international renown for an impressive array of beloved works both popular and scholarly: literary criticism, children's literature, fantasy literature, and numerous books on theology. Among his most celebrated achievements are Out of the Silent Planet, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves, and Surprised by Joy . About the Author C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis (1898-1963), one of the great writers of the twentieth century, also continues to be one of our most influential Christian thinkers. A Fellow and tutor at Oxford until 1954, he spent the rest of his career as Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. He wrote more than thirty books, both popular and scholarly, inlcuding The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Screwtape Letters , The Four Loves , Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy .

The Girl With No Past: A gripping psychological thriller

The Education of Little Tree

Review "Some of it is sad, some of it is hilarious, some of it is unbelievable, and all of it is charming."-- The Atlantic ?????????? From the Back Cover The Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great Depression. About the Author Forrest Carter (1925-1979) was born as Asa Earl Carter and was raised in Oxford, Alabama. He was a segregationist speech writer who reinvented himself as a Western novelist, publishing The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales , The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales , The Education of Little Tree , and Watch for Me on the Mountain .??????????????????????????????????? Read more

Gone Girl

Review “Absorbing . . . In masterly fashion, Flynn depicts the unraveling of a marriage—and of a recession-hit Midwest—by interweaving the wife’s diary entries with the husband’s first-person account.” — The New Yorker “Ms. Flynn writes dark suspense novels that anatomize violence without splashing barrels of blood around the pages . . . Ms. Flynn has much more up her sleeve than a simple missing-person case. As Nick and Amy alternately tell their stories, marriage has never looked so menacing, narrators so unreliable.” — The Wall Street Journal “The story unfolds in precise and riveting prose . . . even while you know you’re being manipulated, searching for the missing pieces is half the thrill of this wickedly absorbing tale.” — O: The Oprah Magazine “Ice-pick-sharp . . . spectacularly sneaky . . . impressively cagey . . . Gone Girl is Ms. Flynn’s dazzling breakthrough. It is wily, mercurial, subtly layered and populated by characters so well imagined that they’re hard to part with.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An ingenious and viperish thriller . . . Even as Gone Girl grows truly twisted and wild, it says smart things about how tenuous power relations are between men and women, and how often couples are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. As if that weren’t enough, Flynn has created a genuinely creepy villain you don't see coming. People love to talk about the banality of evil. You’re about to meet a maniac you could fall in love with.” — Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly “An irresistible summer thriller with a twisting plot worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. Burrowing deep into the murkiest corners of the human psyche, this delectable summer read will give you the creeps and keep you on edge until the last page.” —People (four stars) “It’s simply fantastic: terrifying, darkly funny and at times moving. . . . [ Gone Girl is] her most intricately twisted and deliciously sinister story, dangerous for any reader who prefers to savor a novel as opposed to consuming it whole in one sitting.” —Michelle Weiner, Associated Press “Gillian Flynn’s third novel is both breakneck-paced thriller and masterful dissection of marital breakdown. . . . Wickedly plotted and surprisingly thoughtful, this is a terrifically good read.” — The Boston Globe “ Gone Girl is that rare thing: a book that thrills and delights while holding up a mirror to how we live. . . . Through her two ultimately unreliable narrators, Flynn masterfully weaves the slow trickle of critical details with 90-degree plot turns. . . . Timely, poignant and emotionally rich, Gone Girl will peel away your comfort levels even as you root for its protagonists—despite your best intuition.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Gillian Flynn's barbed and brilliant Gone Girl has two deceitful, disturbing, irresistible narrators and a plot that twists so many times you'll be dizzy.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Flynn is a master manipulator, deftly fielding multiple unreliable narrators, sardonic humor, and social satire in a story of a marriage gone wrong that makes black comedies like The War of the Roses and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf look like scenes from a honeymoon. . . . It is, in a word, amazing.” —Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor “ Gone Girl [is] a thriller with an insane twist and an insidiously realistic take on marriage.” — New York “Brilliantly constructed and consistently absorbing . . . The novel, which twists itself into new shapes, works as a page-turning thriller, but it’s also a study of marriage at its most destructive.” — The Columbus Dispatch About the Author Gillian Flynn is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl , for which she wrote the Golden Globe–nominated screenplay; the New York Times bestsellers Dark Places and Sharp Objects ; and a novella, The Grownup . A former critic for Entertainment Weekly , she lives in Chicago with her husband and children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Nick DunneThe Day Of When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head . You could imagine the skull quite easily. I’d know her head anywhere. And what’s inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? The question I’ve asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do? My eyes flipped open at exactly six a.m. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said—in my face, first thing I saw. 6- 0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless.At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen. I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house, which we still called the new house , even though we’d been back here for two years. It’s a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would—and did—detest. “Should I remove my soul before I come inside?” Her fi rst line upon arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri hometown, in her firm hope that we wouldn’t be stuck here long. But the only houses for rent were clustered in this failed development: a miniature ghost town of bank-owned, recession-busted, price-reduced mansions, a neighborhood that closed before it ever opened. It was a compromise, but Amy didn’t see it that way, not in the least. To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife. I would drag her, caveman-style, to a town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live in the kind of house she used to mock. I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us was always angry. Amy, usually. Do not blame me for this particular grievance, Amy. The Missouri Grievance. Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet. I used to be a writer. I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books. Back when people read things on paper, back when anyone cared about what I thought. I’d arrived in New York in the late ’90s, the last gasp of the glory days, although no one knew it then. New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world—throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won’t kill us in the night. Think about it: a time when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and get paid to write . We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade. I had a job for eleven years and then I didn’t, it was that fast. All around the country, magazines began shuttering, succumbing to a sudden infection brought on by the busted economy. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women’s hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done. Three weeks after I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as it was. (Now I can feel Amy looking over my shoulder, smirking at the time I’ve spent discussing my career, my misfortune, and dismissing her experience in one sentence. That, she would tell you, is typical. Just like Nick , she would say. It was a refrain of hers: Just like Nick to . . . and whatever followed, whatever was just like me , was bad.) Two jobless grown-ups, we spent weeks wandering around our Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas, ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and sofas, eating ice cream at ten a.m. and taking thick afternoon naps. Then one day the phone rang. My twin sister was on the other end. Margo had moved back home after her own New York layoff a year before—the girl is one step ahead of me in everything, even shitty luck. Margo, calling from good ole North Carthage, Missouri, from the house where we grew up, and as I listened to her voice, I saw her at age ten, with a dark cap of hair and overall shorts, sitting on our grandparents’ back dock, her body slouched over like an old pillow, her skinny legs dangling in the water, watching the river flow over fish-white feet, so intently, utterly self- possessed even as a child. Go’s voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave this cold news: Our indomitable mother was dying. Our dad was nearly gone—his (nasty) mind, his (miserable) heart, both murky as he meandered toward the great gray beyond. But it looked like our mother would beat him there. About six months, maybe a year, she had. I could tell that Go had gone to meet with the doctor by herself, taken her studious notes in her slovenly handwriting, and she was teary as she tried to decipher what she’d written. Dates and doses.“Well, f***, I have no idea what this says, is it a nine? Does that even make sense?” she said, and I interrupted. Here was a task, a purpose, held out on my sister’s palm like a plum. I almost cried with relief.“I’ll come back, Go. We’ll move back home. You shouldn’t have to do this all by yourself.” She didn’t believe me. I could hear her breathing on the other end. “I’m serious, Go. Why not? There’s nothing here.” A long exhale. “What about Amy?” That is what I didn’t take long enough to consider. I simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove her from her New York parents—leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind—and transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine. I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how, yes, just like Nick I was for thinking this. The misery it would lead to. “Amy will be fine. Amy . . .” Here was where I should have said, “Amy loves Mom.” But I couldn’t tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days after—“And what did she mean by . . .”—as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn’t on offer. Amy didn’t care to know my family, didn’t want to know my birthplace, and yet for some reason, I thought moving home would be a good idea. Read more

Summer of '42

The Pecan Man

Great book - riveting!

The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel

From Bookmarks Magazine Critics roundly applaud Kim Edwardss debut novel, The Memory Keepers Daughter , which plays into one of our largest fears: What happens when a baby is born with Down syndrome? Edwards, an award-winning short-story writer, extends this question even further: What happens if this baby somehow "disappears" without the mothers knowledge? The Memory Keepers Daughter explores deception, family secrets, the influence of the past on the present, our tendency to rationalize poor decisions, and the tenuous nature of human connections. In her sympathetic rendering of parallel stories, Edwards crafts a riveting "study in what really determines a familys happiness" ( Washington Post ). Critics praised Edwardss prose, which "takes on the cadence of poetry" as she describes her psychologically burdened characters ( Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ). Yet while the Chicago Tribune admired the absence of "sticky-sweet" moments, the Washington Post noted a few times when Edwards slipped "into the treacly trade." But if these minor flaws, combined with abrupt transitions, sometimes slow down the narrative, The Memory Keepers Daughter packs a hefty emotional punch that will keep readers turning the pages. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. Review “Edwards is a born novelist.... The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is rich with psychological detail and the nuances of human connection. [An] extraordinary debut.”  – Chicago Tribune “Anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter .”  – The Washington Post “Absolutely mesmerizing.”  – Sue Monk Kidd “Kim Edwards has created a tale of regret and redemption... you have to reread the passages just to be captivated all over again . . .  simply a beautiful book.”  – Jodi Picoult “Kim Edwards writes with great wisdom and compassion.... This is a wonderful, heartbreaking, heart-healing novel.”  – Luanne Rice “A heart-wrenching book, by turns light and dark, literary and suspenseful.”  – Library Journal “A gripping novel, beautifully written.”  – Ursula Hegi “Gripping from its start. Highly accomplished.”  – The Guardian (UK)   “A remarkable achievement. [Kim Edwards has] clearly hit a nerve.”  – The Independent (UK)   “Masterfully written…a compelling story that explores universal themes: the secrets we harbor, even from those we love; our ability to rationalize all manner of lies; and our fear that there will always be something unknowable about the people we love most.” – The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “I devoured it.”  – Sena Jeter Naslund About the Author Kim Edwards is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper’s Daughter , which was translated into thirty-eight languages.  She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Lake of Dreams, and a collection of short stories, The Secrets of a Fire King . Her honors include the Whiting Award, the British Book Award, and USA Today ’ s Book of the Year, as well as the Nelson Algren Award, a National Magazine Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught widely in the US and Asia, and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1964 March 1964 I THE SNOW STARTED TO FALL SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE HER labor began. A few flakes first, in the dull gray late-afternoon sky, and then wind-driven swirls and eddies around the edges of their wide front porch. He stood by her side at the window, watching sharp gusts of snow billow, then swirl and drift to the ground. All around the neighborhood, lights came on, and the naked branches of the trees turned white.After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the weather for wood he had piled against the garage the previous autumn. The air was bright and cold against his face, and the snow in the driveway was already halfway to his knees. He gathered logs, shaking off their soft white caps and carrying them inside. The kindling in the iron grate caught fire immediately, and he sat for a time on the hearth, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the flames leap, blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly through the darkness, as bright and thick as static in the cones of light cast by the streetlights. By the time he rose and looked out the window, their car had become a soft white hill on the edge of the street. Already his footprints in the driveway had filled and disappeared.He brushed ashes from his hands and sat on the sofa beside his wife, her feet propped on pillows, her swollen ankles crossed, a copy of Dr. Spock balanced on her belly. Absorbed, she licked her index finger absently each time she turned a page. Her hands were slender, her fingers short and sturdy, and she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read. Watching her, he felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife, that their baby, due in just three weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, this would be. They had been married just a year.She looked up, smiling, when he tucked the blanket around her legs."You know, I've been wondering what it's like," she said. "Before we're born, I mean. It's too bad we can't remember." She opened her robe and pulled up the sweater she wore underneath, revealing a belly as round and hard as a melon. She ran her hand across its smooth surface, firelight playing across her skin, casting reddish gold onto her hair. "Do you suppose it's like being inside a great lantern? The book says light permeates my skin, that the baby can already see.""I don't know," he said.She laughed. "Why not?" she asked. "You're the doctor.""I'm just an orthopedic surgeon," he reminded her. "I could tell you the ossification pattern for fetal bones, but that's about it." He lifted her foot, both delicate and swollen inside the light blue sock, and began to massage it gently: the powerful tarsal bone of her heel, the metatarsals and the phalanges, hidden beneath skin and densely layered muscles like a fan about to open. Her breathing filled the quiet room, her foot warmed his hands, and he imagined the perfect, secret, symmetry of bones. In pregnancy she seemed to him beautiful but fragile, fine blue veins faintly visible through her pale white skin.It had been an excellent pregnancy, without medical restrictions. Even so, he had not been able to make love to her for several months. He found himself wanting to protect her instead, to carry her up flights of stairs, to wrap her in blankets, to bring her cups of custard. "I'm not an invalid," she protested each time, laughing. "I'm not some fledgling you discovered on the lawn." Still, she was pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and watched her as she slept: the flutter of her eyelids, the slow even movement of her chest, her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it completely with his own.She was eleven years younger than he was. He had first seen her not much more than a year ago, as she rode up an escalator in a department store downtown, one gray November Saturday while he was buying ties. He was thirty-three years old and new to Lexington, Kentucky, and she had risen out of the crowd like some kind of vision, her blond hair swept back in an elegant chignon, pearls glimmering at her throat and on her ears. She was wearing a coat of dark green wool, and her skin was clear and pale. He stepped onto the escalator, pushing his way upward through the crowd, struggling to keep her in sight. She went to the fourth floor, lingerie and hosiery. When he tried to follow her through aisles dense with racks of slips and brassieres and panties, all glimmering softly, a sales clerk in a navy blue dress with a white collar stopped him, smiling, to ask if she could help. A robe, he said, scanning the aisles until he caught sight of her hair, a dark green shoulder, her bent head revealing the elegant pale curve of her neck. A robe for my sister who lives in New Orleans. He had no sister, of course, or any living family that he acknowledged.The clerk disappeared and came back a moment later with three robes in sturdy terry cloth. He chose blindly, hardly glancing down, taking the one on top. Three sizes, the clerk was saying, and a better selection of colors next month, but he was already in the aisle, a coral-colored robe draped over his arm, his shoes squeaking on the tiles as he moved impatiently between the other shoppers to where she stood.She was shuffling through the stacks of expensive stockings, sheer colors shining through slick cellophane windows: taupe, navy, a maroon as dark as pig's blood. The sleeve of her green coat brushed his and he smelled her perfume, something delicate and yet pervasive, something like the dense pale petals of lilacs outside the window of the student rooms he'd once occupied in Pittsburgh. The squat windows of his basement apartment were always grimy, opaque with steel-factory soot and ash, but in the spring there were lilacs blooming, sprays of white and lavender pressing against the glass, their scent drifting in like light.He cleared his throat—he could hardly breathe—and held up the terry cloth robe, but the clerk behind the counter was laughing, telling a joke, and she did not notice him. When he cleared his throat again she glanced at him, annoyed, then nodded at her customer, now holding three thin packages of stockings like giant playing cards in her hand."I'm afraid Miss Asher was here first," the clerk said, cool and haughty.Their eyes met then, and he was startled to see they were the same dark green as her coat. She was taking him in—the solid tweed overcoat, his face clean-shaven and flushed with cold, his trim fingernails. She smiled, amused and faintly dismissive, gesturing to the robe on his arm."For your wife?" she asked. She spoke with what he recognized as a genteel Kentucky accent, in this city of old money where such distinctions mattered. After just six months in town, he already knew this. "It's all right, Jean," she went on, turning back to the clerk. "Go on and take him first. This poor man must feel lost and awkward, in here with all the lace." "It's for my sister," he told her, desperate to reverse the bad impression he was making. It had happened to him often here; he was too forward or direct and gave offense. The robe slipped to the floor and he bent to pick it up, his face flushing as he rose. Her gloves were lying on the glass, her bare hands folded lightly next to them. His discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.He tried again. "I'm sorry. I don't seem to know what I'm doing. And I'm in a hurry. I'm a doctor. I'm late to the hospital."Her smiled changed then, grew serious."I see," she said, turning back to the clerk. "Really, Jean, do take him first."She agreed to see him again, writing her name and phone number in the perfect script she'd been taught in third grade, her teacher an ex-nun who had engraved the rules of penmanship in her small charges. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect. Eight years old, pale and skinny, the woman in the green coat who would become his wife had clenched her small fingers around the pen and practiced cursive writing alone in her room, hour after hour, until she wrote with the exquisite fluidity of running water. Later, listening to that story, he would imagine her head bent beneath the lamplight, her fingers in a painful cluster around the pen, and he would wonder at her tenacity, her belief in beauty and in the authoritative voice of the ex-nun. But on that day he did not know any of this. On that day he carried the slip of paper in the pocket of his white coat through one sickroom after another, remembering her letters flowing one into another to form the perfect shape of her name. He phoned her that same evening and took her to dinner the next night, and three months later they were married.Now, in these last months of her pregnancy, the soft coral robe fit her perfectly. She had found it packed away and had held it up to show him. But your sister died so long ago, she exclaimed, suddenly puzzled, and for an instant he had frozen, smiling, the lie from a year before darting like a dark bird through the room. Then he shrugged, sheepish. I had to say something, he told her. I had to find a way to get your name. She smiled then, and crossed the room and embraced him.The snow fell. For the next few hours, they read and talked. Sometimes she caught his hand and put it on her belly to feel the baby move. From time to time he got up to feed the fire, glancing out the window to see three inches on the ground, then five or six. The streets were softened and quiet, and there were few cars.At eleven she rose and went to bed. He stayed downstairs, reading the latest issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery . He was known to be a very good doctor, with a talent for diagnosis and a reputation for skillful work. He had graduated first in his class.Still, he was young enough and—though he hid it very carefully— unsure enough about his skills that he studied in every spare moment, collecting each success he accomplished as one more piece of evidence in his own favor. He felt himself to be an aberration, born with a love for learning in a family absorbed in simply scrambling to get by, day to day. They had seen education as an unnecessary luxury, a means to no certain end. Poor, when they went to the doctor at all it was to the clinic in Morgantown, fifty miles away. His memories of those rare trips were vivid, bouncing in the back of the borrowed pickup truck, dust flying in their wake. The dancing road, his sister had called it, from her place in the cab with their parents. In Morgantown the rooms were dim, the murky green or turquoise of pond water, and the doctors had been hurried, brisk with them, distracted.All these years later, he still had moments when he sensed the gaze of those doctors and felt himself to be an imposter, about to be unmasked by a single mistake. He knew his choice of specialties reflected this. Not for him the random excitement of general medicine or the delicate risky plumbing of the heart. He dealt mostly with broken limbs, sculpting casts and viewing X-rays, watching breaks slowly yet miraculously knit themselves back together. He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.He read well past midnight, until the words shimmered senselessly on the bright white pages, and then he tossed the journal on the coffee table and got up to tend to the fire. He tamped the charred fire-laced logs into embers, opened the damper fully, and closed the brass fireplace screen. When he turned off the lights, shards of fire glowed softly through layers of ash as delicate and white as the snow piled so high now on the porch railings and the rhododendron bushes.The stairs creaked with his weight. He paused by the nursery door, studying the shadowy shapes of the crib and the changing table, the stuffed animals arranged on shelves. The walls were painted a pale sea green. His wife had made the Mother Goose quilt that hung on the far wall, sewing with tiny stitches, tearing out entire panels if she noted the slightest imperfection. A border of bears was stenciled just below the ceiling; she had done that too. On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.He stood there for a long time, until he heard her moving quietly. He found her sitting on the edge of their bed, her head bent, her hands gripping the mattress."I think this is labor," she said, looking up. Her hair was loose, a strand caught on her lip. He brushed it back behind her ear. She shook her head as he sat beside her. "I don't know. I feel strange. This crampy feeling, it comes and goes."He helped her lie down on her side and then he lay down too, massaging her back. "It's probably just false labor," he assured her. "It's three weeks early, after all, and first babies are usually late." This was true, he knew, he believed it as he spoke, and he was, in fact, so sure of it that after a time he drifted into sleep. He woke to find her standing over the bed, shaking his shoulder. Her robe, her hair, looked nearly white in the strange snowy light that filled their room."I've been timing them. Five minutes apart. They're strong, and I'm scared."He felt an inner surge then; excitement and fear tumbled through him like foam pushed by a wave. But he had been trained to be calm in emergencies, to keep his emotions in check, so he was able to stand without any urgency, take the watch, and walk with her, slowly and calmly, up and down the hall. When the contractions came she squeezed his hand so hard he felt as if the bones in his fingers might fuse. The contractions were as she had said, five minutes apart, then four. He took the suitcase from the closet, feeling numb suddenly with the momentousness of these events, long expected but a surprise all the same. He moved, as she did, but the world slowed to stillness around them. He was acutely aware of every action, the way breath rushed against his tongue, the way her feet slid uncomfortably into the only shoes she could still wear, her swollen flesh making a ridge against the dark gray leather. When he took her arm he felt strangely as if he himself were suspended in the room, somewhere near the light fixture, watching them both from above, noting every nuance and detail: how she trembled with a contraction, how his fingers closed so firmly and protectively around her elbow. How outside, still, the snow was drifting down. He helped her into her green wool coat, which hung unbuttoned, gaping around her belly. He found the leather gloves she'd been wearing when he first saw her, too. It seemed important that these details be right. They stood together on the porch for a moment, stunned by the soft white world."Wait here," he said, and went down the steps, breaking a path through the drifts. The doors of the old car were frozen, and it took him several minutes to get one open. A white cloud flew up, glittering, when the door at last swung back, and he scrambled on the floor of the backseat for the ice scraper and brush. When he emerged his wife was leaning against a porch pillar, her forehead on her arms. He understood in that moment both how much pain she was in and that the baby was really coming, coming that very night. He resisted a powerful urge to go to her and, instead, put all his energy into freeing the car, warming first one bare hand and then the other beneath his armpits when the pain of the cold became too great, warming them but never pausing, brushing snow from the windshield and the windows and the hood, watching it scatter and disappear into the soft sea of white around his calves."You didn't mention it would hurt this much," she said, when he reached the porch. He put his arm around her shoulders and helped her down the steps. "I can walk," she insisted. "It's just when the pain comes.""I know," he said, but he did not let her go.When they reached the car she touched his arm and gestured to the house, veiled with snow and glowing like a lantern in the darkness of the street."When we come back we'll have our baby with us," she said. "Our world will never be the same."The windshield wipers were frozen, and snow spilled down the back window when he pulled into the street. He drove slowly, thinking how beautiful Lexington was, the trees and bushes so heavy with snow. When he turned onto the main street the wheels hit ice and the car slid, briefly, fluidly, across the intersection, coming to rest by a snowbank. "We're fine," he announced, his head rushing. Fortunately, there wasn't another car in sight. The steering wheel was as hard and cold as stone beneath his bare hands. Now and then he wiped at the windshield with the back of his hand, leaning to peer through the hole he'd made. "I called Bentley before we left," he said, naming his colleague, an obstetrician. "I said to meet us at the office. We'll go there. It's closer."She was silent for a moment, her hand gripping the dashboard as she breathed through a contraction. "As long as I don't have my baby in this old car," she managed at last, trying to joke. "You know how much I've always hated it."He smiled, but he knew her fear was real, and he shared it. Methodical, purposeful: even in an emergency he could not change his nature. He came to a full stop at every light, signaled turns to the empty streets. Every few minutes she braced one hand against the dashboard again and focused her breathing, which made him swallow and glance sideways at her, more nervous on that night than he could ever remember being. More nervous than his in first anatomy class, the body of a young boy peeled open to reveal its secrets. More nervous than on his wedding day, her family filling one side of the church, and on the other just a handful of his colleagues. His parents were dead, his sister too.There was a single car in the clinic parking lot, the nurse's powder-blue Fairlane, conservative and pragmatic and newer than his own. He'd called her, too. He pulled up in front of the entrance and helped his wife out. Now that they had reached the office safely they were both exhilarated, laughing as they pushed into the bright lights of the waiting room.The nurse met them. The moment he saw her, he knew something was wrong. She had large blue eyes in a pale face that might have been forty or twenty-five, and whenever something was not to her liking a thin vertical line formed across her forehead, just between her eyes. It was there now as she gave them her news: Bentley's car had fishtailed on the unplowed country road where he lived, spun around twice on the ice beneath the snow, and floated into a ditch."You're saying Dr. Bentley won't be coming?" his wife asked. The nurse nodded. She was tall, so thin and angular it seemed the bones might poke from beneath her skin at any moment. Her large blue eyes were solemn and intelligent. For months, there had been rumors, jokes, that she was a little bit in love with him. He had dismissed them as idle office gossip, annoying but natural when a man and single woman worked in such close proximity, day after day. And then one evening he had fallen asleep at his desk. He'd been dreaming, back in his childhood home, his mother putting up jars of fruit that gleamed jewel-like on the oilcloth-covered table beneath the window. His sister, age five, sat holding a doll in one listless hand. A passing image, perhaps a memory, but one that filled him simultaneously with sadness and with yearning. The house was his but empty now, deserted when his sister died and his parents moved away, the rooms his mother had scrubbed to a dull gleam abandoned, filled only with the rustlings of squirrels and mice.He'd had tears in his eyes when he opened them, raising his head from the desk. The nurse was standing in the doorway, her face gentled by emotion. She was beautiful in that moment, half smiling, not at all the efficient woman who worked beside him so quietly and competently each day. Their eyes met, and it seemed to the doctor that he knew her—that they knew each other—in some profound and certain way. For an instant nothing whatsoever stood between them; it was an intimacy of such magnitude that he was motionless, transfixed. Then she blushed severely and looked aside.She cleared her throat and straightened, saying that she had worked two hours overtime and would be going. For many days, her eyes would not meet his.After that, when people teased him about her, he made them stop. She's a very fine nurse, he would say, holding up one hand against the jokes, honoring that moment of communion they had shared. She's the best I've ever worked with. This was true, and now he was very glad to have her with him."How about the emergency room?" she asked. "Could you make it?"The doctor shook his head. The contractions were just a minute or so apart."This baby won't wait," he said, looking at his wife. Snow had melted in her hair and glittered like a diamond tiara. "This baby's on its way.""It's all right," his wife said, stoic. Her voice was harder now, determined. "This will be a better story to tell him, growing up: him or her."The nurse smiled, the line still visible though fainter, between her eyes. "Let's get you inside then," she said. "Let's get you some help with the pain."He went into his own office to find a coat, and when he entered Bentley's examination room his wife was lying on the bed, her feet in the stirrups. The room was pale blue, filled with chrome and white enamel and fine instruments of gleaming steel. The doctor went to the sink and washed his hands. He felt extremely alert, aware of the tiniest details, and as he performed this ordinary ritual he felt his panic at Bentley's absence begin to ease. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to focus on his task."Everything's progressing," the nurse said, when he turned. "Everything looks fine. I'd put her at ten centimeters; see what you think."He sat on the low stool and reached up into the soft warm cave of his wife's body. The amniotic sac was still intact, and through it he could feel the baby's head, smooth and hard like a baseball. His child. He should be pacing a waiting room somewhere. Across the room, the blinds were closed on the only window, and as he pulled his hand from the warmth of his wife's body he found himself wondering about the snow, if it was falling still, silencing the city and the land beyond."Yes," he said, "ten centimeters.""Phoebe," his wife said. He could not see her face, but her voice was clear. They had been discussing names for months and had reached no decisions. "For a girl, Phoebe. And for a boy, Paul, after my great-uncle. Did I tell you this?" she asked. "I meant to tell you I'd decided.""Those are good names," the nurse said, soothing."Phoebe and Paul," the doctor repeated, but he was concentrating on the contraction now rising in his wife's flesh. He gestured to the nurse, who readied the gas. During his residency years, the practice had been to put the woman in labor out completely until the birth was over, but times had changed—it was 1964—and Bentley, he knew, used gas more selectively. Better that she should be awake to push; he would put her out for the worst of the contractions, for the crowning and the birth. His wife tensed and cried out, and the baby moved in the birth canal, bursting the amniotic sac. "Now," the doctor said, and the nurse put the mask in place. His wife's hands relaxed, her fists unclenching as the gas took effect, and she lay still, tranquil and unknowing, as another contraction and another moved through her."It's coming fast for a first baby," the nurse observed."Yes," the doctor said. "So far so good."Half an hour passed in this way. His wife roused and moaned and pushed, and when he felt she had had enough—or when she cried out that the pain was overwhelming—he nodded to the nurse, who gave her the gas. Except for the quiet exchange of instructions, they did not speak. Outside the snow kept falling, drifting along the sides of houses, filling the roads. The doctor sat on a stainless steel chair, narrowing his concentration to the essential facts. He had delivered five babies during medical school, all live births and all successful, and he focused now on those, seeking in his memory the details of care. As he did so, his wife, lying with her feet in the stirrups and her belly rising so high that he could not see her face, slowly became one with those other women. Her round knees, her smooth narrow calves, her ankles, all these were before him, familiar and beloved. Yet he did not think to stroke her skin or put a reassuring hand on her knee. It was the nurse who held her hand while she pushed. To the doctor, focused on what was immediately before him, she became not just herself but more than herself; a body like other bodies, a patient whose needs he must meet with every technical skill he had. It was necessary, more necessary than usual, to keep his emotions in check. As time passed, the strange moment he had experienced in their bedroom came to him again. He began to feel as if he were somehow removed from the scene of this birth, both there and also floating elsewhere, observing from some safe distance. He watched himself make the careful, precise incision for the episiotomy. A good one, he thought, as the blood welled in a clean line, not letting himself remember the times he'd touched that same flesh in passion.The head crowned. In three more pushes it emerged, and then the body slid into his waiting hands and the baby cried out, its blue skin pinking up.It was a boy, red-faced and dark-haired, his eyes alert, suspicious of the lights and the cold bright slap of air. The doctor tied the umbilical cord and cut it. My son, he allowed himself to think. My son. "He's beautiful," the nurse said. She waited while he examined the child, noting his steady heart, rapid and sure, the long-fingered hands and shock of dark hair. Then she took the infant to the other room to bathe him and to drop the silver nitrate into his eyes. The small cries drifted back to them, and his wife stirred. The doctor stayed where he was with his hand on her knee, taking several deep breaths, awaiting the afterbirth. My son, he thought again."Where is the baby?" his wife asked, opening her eyes and pushing hair away from her flushed face. "Is everything all right?""It's a boy," the doctor said, smiling down at her. "We have a son. You'll see him as soon as he's clean. He's absolutely perfect."His wife's face, soft with relief and exhaustion, suddenly tightened with another contraction, and the doctor, expecting the afterbirth, returned to the stool between her legs and pressed lightly against her abdomen. She cried out, and at the same moment he understood what was happening, as startled as if a window had appeared suddenly in a concrete wall."It's all right," he said. "Everything's fine. Nurse," he called, as the next contraction tightened.She came at once, carrying the baby, now swaddled in white blankets."He's a nine on the Apgar," she announced. "That's very good."His wife lifted her arms for the baby and began to speak, but then the pain caught her and she lay back down. "Nurse?" the doctor said, "I need you here. Right now."After a moment's confusion the nurse put two pillows on the floor, placed the baby on them, and joined the doctor by the table. "More gas," he said. He saw her surprise and then her quick nod of comprehension as she complied. His hand was on his wife's knee; he felt the tension ease from her muscles as the gas worked. "Twins?" the nurse asked.The doctor, who had allowed himself to relax after the boy was born, felt shaky now, and he did not trust himself to do more than nod. Steady, he told himself, as the next head crowned. You are anywhere, he thought, watching from some fine point on the ceiling as his hands worked with method and precision. This is any birth. This baby was smaller and came easily, sliding so quickly into his gloved hands that he leaned forward, using his chest to make sure it did not fall. "It's a girl," he said, and cradled her like a football, face down, tapping her back until she cried out. Then he turned her over to see her face.Creamy white vernix whorled in her delicate skin, and she was slippery with amniotic fluid and traces of blood. The blue eyes were cloudy, the hair jet black, but he barely noticed all of this. What he was looking at were the unmistakable features, the eyes turned up as if with laughter, the epicanthal fold across their lids, the flattened nose. A classic case, he remembered his professor saying as they examined a similar child, years ago. A mongoloid. Do you know what that means? And the doctor, dutiful, had recited the symptoms he'd memorized from the text: flaccid muscle tone, delayed growth and mental development, possible heart complications, early death. The professor had nodded, placing his stethoscope on the baby's smooth bare chest. Poor kid. There's nothing they can do except try to keep him clean. They ought to spare themselves and send him to a home. The doctor had felt transported back in time. His sister had been born with a heart defect and had grown very slowly, her breath catching and coming in little gasps whenever she tried to run. For many years, until the first trip to the clinic in Morgantown, they had not known what was the matter. Then they knew, and there was nothing they could do. All his mother's attention had gone to her, and yet she had died when she was twelve years old. The doctor had been sixteen, already living in town to attend high school, already on his way to Pittsburgh and medical school and the life he was living now. Still, he remembered the depth and endurance of his mother's grief, the way she walked up hill to the grave every morning, her arms folded against whatever weather she encountered.The nurse stood beside him and studied the baby."I'm sorry, doctor," she said.He held the infant, forgetting what he ought to do next. Her tiny hands were perfect. But the gap between her big toes and the others, that was there, like a missing tooth, and when he looked deeply at her eyes he saw the Brushfield spots, as tiny and distinct as flecks of snow in the irises. He imagined her heart, the size of a plum and very possibly defective, and he thought of the nursery, so carefully painted, with its soft animals and single crib. He thought of his wife standing on the sidewalk before their brightly veiled home, saying, Our world will never be the same. The baby's hand brushed his, and he started. Without volition he began to move through the familiar patterns. He cut the cord and checked her heart, her lungs. All the time he was thinking of the snow, the silver car floating into a ditch, the deep quiet of this empty clinic. Later, when he considered this night—and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather—what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling steadily outside. The silence was so deep and encompassing that he felt himself floating to a new height, some point above this room and then beyond, where he was one with the snow and where this scene in the room was something unfolding in a different life, a life at which he was a random spectator, like a scene glimpsed through a warmly lit window while walking on a darkened street. That was what he would remember, that feeling of endless space. The doctor in the ditch, and the lights of his own house burning far away."All right. Clean her up, please," he said, releasing the slight weight of the infant into the nurse's arms. "But keep her in the other room. I don't want my wife to know. Not right away." The nurse nodded. She disappeared and then came back to lift his son into the baby carrier they'd brought. The doctor was by then intent on delivering the placentas, which came out beautifully, dark and thick, each the size of a small plate. Fraternal twins, male and female, one visibly perfect and the other marked by an extra chromosome in every cell of her body. What were the odds of that? His son lay in the carrier, his hands waving now and then, fluid and random with the quick water motions of the womb. He injected his wife with a sedative, then leaned down to repair the episiotomy. It was nearly dawn, light gathering faintly in the windows. He watched his hands move, thinking how well the stitches were going in, as tiny as her own, as neat and even. She had torn out a whole panel of the quilt because of one mistake, invisible to him.When the doctor finished, he found the nurse sitting in a rocker in the waiting room, cradling the baby girl in her arms. She met his gaze without speaking, and he remembered the night she had watched him as he slept."There's a place," he said, writing the name and address on the back of an envelope. "I'd like you to take her there. When it's light, I mean. I'll issue the birth certificate, and I'll call to say you're coming.""But your wife," the nurse said, and he heard, from his distant place, the surprise and disapproval in her voice.He thought of his sister, pale and thin, trying to catch her breath, and his mother turning to the window to hide her tears."Don't you see?" he asked, his voice soft. "This poor child will most likely have a serious heart defect. A fatal one. I'm trying to spare us all a terrible grief."He spoke with conviction. He believed his own words. The nurse sat staring at him, her expression surprised but otherwise unreadable, as he waited for her to say yes. In the state of mind he was in it did not occur to him that she might say anything else. He did not imagine, as he would later that night, and in many nights to come, the ways in which he was jeopardizing everything. Instead, he felt impatient with her slowness and very tired all of a sudden, and the clinic, so familiar, seemed strange around him, as if he were walking in a dream. The nurse studied him with her blue unreadable eyes. He returned her gaze, unflinching, and at last she nodded, a movement so slight as to be almost imperceptible."The snow," she murmured, looking down.But by midmorning the storm had begun to abate, and the distant sounds of plows grated through the still air. He watched from the upstairs window as the nurse knocked snow from her powder-blue car and drove off into the soft white world. The baby was hidden, asleep in a box lined with blankets, on the seat beside her. The doctor watched her turn left onto the street and disappear. Then he went back and sat with his family.His wife slept, her gold hair splayed across the pillow. Now and then the doctor dozed. Awake, he gazed into the empty parking lot, watching smoke rise from the chimneys across the street, preparing the words he would say. That it was no one's fault, that their daughter would be in good hands, with others like herself, with ceaseless care. That it would be best this way for them all.In the late morning, when the snow had stopped for good, his son cried out in hunger, and his wife woke up."Where's the baby?" she said, rising up on her elbows, pushing her hair from her face. He was holding their son, warm and light, and he sat down beside her, settling the baby in her arms."Hello, my sweet," he said. "Look at our beautiful son. You were very brave."She kissed the baby's forehead, then undid her robe and put him to her breast. His son latched on at once, and his wife looked up and smiled. He took her free hand, remembering how hard she had held onto him, imprinting the bones of her fingers on his flesh. He remembered how much he had wanted to protect her."Is everything all right?" she asked. "Darling? What is it?""We had twins," he told her slowly, thinking of the shocks of dark hair, the slippery bodies moving in his hands. Tears rose in his eyes. "One of each.""Oh," she said. "A little girl too? Phoebe and Paul. But where is she?"Her fingers were so slight, he thought, like the bones of a little bird."My darling," he began. His voice broke, and the words he had rehearsed so carefully were gone. He closed his eyes, and when he could speak again more words came, unplanned."Oh, my love," he said. "I am so sorry. Our little daughter died as she was born." Read more

Rosemary Gladstar's Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health: 175 Teas, Tonics, Oils, Salves, Tinctures, and Other Natural Remedies for the Entire Family

From the Back Cover Homemade Remedies from Nature's Pharmacy Soothe your baby's colic, moisturize dry skin, relieve cold symptoms, or simply enjoy a good night's sleep. Renowned herbalist Rosemary Gladstar provides time-tested natural therapies and herbal remedies that are safe, effective, and easy to use. She guides you every step of the way, from the growing and ecological harvesting of herbs to basic preparations and dosage directions. Originally published in hardcover as Rosemary Gladstar's Family Herbal , this comprehensive recipe-collection offers a potent prescription for energy, health, and vitality at every stage of life. Nurture yourself and those you love with nature's healing herbs. About the Author Rosemary Gladstar is the best-selling author of Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide and Rosemary Gladstar’s Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health , which draw on her 40-plus years of experiences studying and teaching about the healing properties of herbs. She is a world-renowned educator, activist, and entrepreneur, and the founding director of Sage Mountain Herbal Retreat Center, the International Herb Symposium, and the New England Women’s Herbal Conference. Gladstar is founding president of United Plant Savers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation and preservation of native American herbs. She was the original formulator for Traditional Medicinal herbal teas and has led herbal educational adventures around the world. She is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, and serves on the board of the Association for the Advancement of Restorative Medicine and The National Health Freedom Coalition. She lives in Vermont.

The Fifth Child

Amazon.com Review The married couple in this novel pull off a remarkable achievement: They purchase a three-story house with oodles of bedrooms, and, on a middle-class income, in the '70s, fill it to the brim with happy children and visiting relatives. Their holiday gatherings are sumptuous celebrations of life and togetherness. And then the fifth child arrives. He's just a child--he's not supernatural. But is he really human? This is an elegantly written tale that the New York Times called "a horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse . . . a moral fable of the genre that includes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and George Orwell's 1984." From Publishers Weekly A smug, conservative couple's fifth child (after four model children) inspires fear and horror. "The implications of this slim, gripping work are ominous," wrote PW. Lessing indicts those in authority who refuse to acknowledge responsibility for the violence inherent in mankind. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review “A hair-raising tale…as full of twists and shocks as any page turner could desire.” — Time “Terse and chilling…. A witch’s brew of conflicting fears.” — The New York Review of Books “A horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse…. A moral fable of the genre that includes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four .” — The New York Times Book Review From the Inside Flap A self-satisfied couple intent on raising a happy family is shocked by the birth of an abnormal and brutal fifth child. From the Back Cover fied couple intent on raising a happy family is shocked by the birth of an abnormal and brutal fifth child. About the Author Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia, in 1919, and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Read more

Orphan Train

From Booklist A long journey from home and the struggle to find it again form the heart of the intertwined stories that make up this moving novel. Foster teen Molly is performing community-service work for elderly widow Vivian, and as they go through Vivian’s cluttered attic, they discover that their lives have much in common. When Vivian was a girl, she was taken to a new life on an orphan train. These trains carried children to adoptive families for 75 years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the start of the Great Depression. Novelist Kline (Bird in Hand, 2009) brings Vivian’s hardscrabble existence in Depression-era Minnesota to stunning life. Molly’s present-day story in Maine seems to pale in comparison, but as we listen to the two characters talk, we find grace and power in both of these seemingly disparate lives. Although the girls are vulnerable, left to the whims of strangers, they show courage and resourcefulness. Kline illuminates a largely hidden chapter of American history, while portraying the coming-of-age of two resilient young women. --Bridget Thoreson Review “A compelling story about loss, adaptability, and courage . . . With compassion and delicacy Kline presents a little-known chapter of American history and draws comparisons with the modern-day foster care system.” — Library Journal “In ORPHAN TRAIN, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or--perhaps most importantly--ourselves.” — Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle “I loved this book: its absorbing back-and-forth story, its vivid history, its eminently loveable characters. ORPHAN TRAIN wrecked my heart and made me glad to be literate.” — Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys “One of the most powerful novels I’ve ever read...I am compelling all of you, even begging you, to make this novel your next read. You’ll be talking about it for years to come!” — Naples Daily News (FL) “A gem.” — Huffington Post “Absorbing...a heartfelt page-turner about two women finding a sense of home...Kline lets us live the characters’ experiences vividly through their skin...The growth from instinct to conscious understanding to partnership between the two is the foundation for a moving tale.” — Publishers Weekly “Kline draws a dramatic, emotional story from a neglected corner of American history.” — Kirkus Reviews “I was so moved by this book. I loved Molly and Vivian, two brave, difficult, true-hearted women who disrupt one another’s lives in beautiful ways, and loved journeying with them, through heartbreak and stretches of history I’d never known existed, out of loneliness toward family and home.” — Marisa de los Santos, New York Times-bestselling author of Belong to Me and Falling Together “A lovely novel about the search for family that also happens to illuminate a fascinating and forgotten chapter of American history. Beautiful.” — Ann Packer, New York Times-bestselling author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier and Swim Back to Me “Christina Baker Kline writes exquisitely about two unlikely friends . . . each struggling to transcend a past of isolation and hardship. ORPHAN TRAIN will hold you in its grip as their fascinating tales unfold.” — Cathy Marie Buchanan, New York Times -bestselling author of The Painted Girls “Christina Baker Kline’s latest wonder, ORPHAN TRAIN, makes for compulsive reading...Meticulously researched and yet full of the breath of life, Kline’s novel takes us on an historical journey where survival depends upon one’s own steely backbone, and the miracle of a large and generous heart.” — Helen Schulman, New York Times -bestselling author of This Beautiful Life “A poignant and memorable story of two steadfast, courageous women...A revelation of the universal yearing for belonging, for family, for acceptance and, ultimately, the journeys we must all make to find them.” — Kathleen Kent, New York Times -bestselling author of The Heretic's Daughter and The Traitor's Wife “Reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s Amy and Isabel , this Orphan Train carries us along until the stories of these two women become one.” — Mary Morris, author of, most recently, Revenge “This superbly composed novel tells two parallel stories of suffering and perseverance, capturing the heart and mind equally and remaining mesmerizing through the intensely heart-wrenching conclusion.” — Romantic Times, Top Pick “The intertwined stories in this novel will surely please those looking for a compelling new read.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer “One of the most intriguing, tender novels of 2013...This is a warm, satisfying, and inspirational story.” — The New Maine Times Book Review From the Back Cover Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by pure luck. Would they be adopted by a kind and loving family, or would they face a childhood and adoles-cence of hard labor and servitude? As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was one such child, sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast of Maine, the memories of her upbringing rendered a hazy blur. But in her attic, hidden in trunks, are vestiges of a turbulent past. Seventeen-year-old Molly Ayer knows that a community-service position helping an elderly widow clean out her attic is the only thing keeping her out of juvenile hall. But as Molly helps Vivian sort through her keepsakes and possessions, she discovers that she and Vivian aren’t as different as they appear. A Penobscot Indian who has spent her youth in and out of foster homes, Molly is also an outsider being raised by strangers, and she, too, has unanswered questions about the past. Moving between contemporary Maine and Depression-era Minnesota, Orphan Train is a powerful tale of upheaval and resilience, second chances, and unexpected friendship. About the Author Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train as well as A Piece of the World . She lives outside New York City and spends as much time as possible on the coast of Maine. Learn more about Christina at www.christinabakerkline.com. Read more

Still Alice

About the Author Acclaimed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science, Lisa Genova is the New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice , Left Neglected , Love Anthony , Inside the O’Briens , and Remember . Still Alice was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, and Kristen Stewart. Lisa graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in biopsychology and holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University. She travels worldwide speaking about the neurological diseases she writes about and has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show , Today , PBS NewsHour , CNN, and NPR. Her TED talk, What You Can Do To Prevent Alzheimer's, has been viewed over 2 million times.

The Husband's Secret

Review Praise for The Husband's Secret “Spellbinding...A knockout!”—Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author   “ The Husband’s Secret is so good, you won’t be able to keep it to yourself.”— USA Today “What a wonderful writer—smart, wise, funny.”—Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author   “Brilliant.”—Sophie Hannah, New York Times bestselling author   “Lip-smacking and sharply intelligent.”— Entertainment Weekly “Perfect for vacation reading: There’s humor, suspense, a circle of appealing women.”— People “Secrets can be sinister; they can eat you alive. But they can also set you free. The Husband’s Secret demonstrates this power with one of the most entertaining stories I have read in ages. Perfect for book clubs—lots to debate in these pages. I just loved it.”—Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author   “Simultaneously a page-turner and a book one has to put down occasionally to think about and absorb, Moriarty’s novel challenges the reader as well as her characters, but in the best possible way.”— Publishers Weekly “Reading groups rejoice. This meaty novel from the bestselling author will probably land on many must-read lists.”— Fort Worth Star-Telegram “Moriarty may be an edgier, more provocative, and bolder successor to Maeve Binchy.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) About the Author Liane Moriarty is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Nine Perfect Strangers , Three Wishes , Truly Madly Guilty , Big Little Lies , The Husband’s Secret , The Hypnotist’s Love Story , and What Alice Forgot . She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PRAISE FOR THE HUSBAND’S SECRET “In The Husband’s Secret , Liane Moriarty has created a contemporary Pandora whose dilemma is spellbinding. Shocking, complex, and thought-provoking, this is a story reading groups will devour. A knockout!” —Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author “Brilliant.” —Sophie Hannah, international bestselling author “I really enjoyed The Husband’s Secret , and raced right through it in two days. It’s a knowing, touching, and entertaining page-turner. What a wonderful writer—smart, wise, funny.” —Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author “A novel that’s perfect for vacation reading: There’s humor, suspense, a circle of appealing women whose dilemmas intersect with Cecilia’s . . .” — People “Liane Moriarty is far more than the skillful writer of potboilers. Her compelling characters could be your friends and neighbors, nice and neurotic in equal doses . . . Amid three intertwined storylines and terrific plot twists, Moriarty presents a nuanced and moving portrait of the meaning of love, both marital and familial, and how life can hinge on a misunderstanding or a decision made in haste. The Husband’s Secret is so good, you won’t be able to keep it to yourself.” — USA Today “Reading groups rejoice. This meaty novel from the bestselling author will probably land on many must-read lists.” — Dallas–Fort Worth Star-Telegram “A smart, thoughtful read . . . [a] lip-smacking and intelligently written novel.” — Entertainment Weekly “Moriarty may be an edgier, more provocative, and bolder successor to Maeve Binchy.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “At first, this reviewer wanted to warn readers not to be taken in by the light tone of Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret . On second thought, maybe readers should let this rather crafty novelist’s deceptive breeziness and humor sweep them along. It makes the shocks just that much more deliciously nasty, including the gob-smacking twist in the epilogue . . . The genius of The Husband’s Secret is that it makes us start to wonder what in our own lives would—or would not—have happened if, say, we had waited just fi ve more minutes before we walked out the door, had not said that hurtful thing, had applied a bit of logic to that situation.” — BookPage “Secrets can be sinister; they can eat you alive. But they can also set you free. The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty demonstrates this power with one of the most entertaining stories I have read in ages. Perfect for book clubs—lots to debate in these pages. I just loved it.” —Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author “This great summer read is hard to put down.” — Library Journal “A provocative page-turner . . .” — Woman’s World Poor, poor Pandora. Zeus sends her off to marry Epimetheus, a not especially bright man she’s never even met, along with a mysterious covered jar. Nobody tells Pandora a word about the jar. Nobody tells her not to open the jar. Naturally, she opens the jar. What else has she got to do? How was she to know that all those dreadful ills would go whooshing out to plague mankind forevermore, and that the only thing left in the jar would be hope? Why wasn’t there a warning label? And then everyone’s like, Oh , Pandora . Where’s your willpower? You were told not to open that box, you snoopy girl, you typical woman with your insatiable curiosity; now look what you’ve gone and done . When for one thing it was a jar , not a box, and for another—how many times does she have to say it?—nobody said a word about not opening it! ONE MONDAY It was all because of the Berlin Wall. If it weren’t for the Berlin Wall, Cecilia would never have found the letter, and then she wouldn’t be sitting here, at the kitchen table, willing herself not to rip it open. The envelope was gray with a fine layer of dust. The words on the front were written in a scratchy blue ballpoint pen, the handwriting as familiar as her own. She turned it over. It was sealed with a yellowing piece of sticky tape. When was it written? It felt old, like it was written years ago, but there was no way of knowing for sure. She wasn’t going to open it. It was absolutely clear that she should not open it. She was the most decisive person she knew, and she’d already decided not to open the letter, so there was nothing more to think about. Although, honestly, if she did open it, what would be the big deal? Any woman would open it like a shot. She listed all her friends and what their responses would be if she were to ring them up right now and ask what they thought. Miriam Oppenheimer: Yup. Open it. Erica Edgecliff: Are you kidding, open it right this second. Laura Marks: Yes, you should open it and then you should read it out loud to me. Sarah Sacks: . . . There would be no point asking Sarah because she was incapable of making a decision. If Cecilia asked her if she wanted tea or coffee, she would sit for a full minute, her forehead furrowed as she agonized over the pros and cons of each beverage, before finally saying, “Coffee! No, wait, tea!” A decision like this one would give her a seizure. Mahalia Ramachandran: Absolutely not. It would be completely disrespectful to your husband. You must not open it. Mahalia could be a little too sure of herself at times with those huge brown ethical eyes. Cecilia left the letter sitting on the kitchen table and went to put the kettle on. Damn that Berlin Wall, and that Cold War, and whoever it was who sat there back in nineteen forty-whenever-it-was, mulling over the problem of what to do with those ungrateful Germans; the guy who suddenly clicked his fingers and said, “Got it, by Jove! We’ll build a great big bloody wall and keep the buggers in!” Presumably he hadn’t sounded like a British sergeant major. Esther would know who first came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall. Esther would probably be able to give her his date of birth. It would have been a man, of course. Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective. Was that sexist? She filled the kettle, switched it on and cleaned the droplets of water in the sink with a paper towel so that it shone. One of the mums from school, who had three sons almost exactly the same ages as Cecilia’s three daughters, had said that some remark Cecilia had made was “a teeny-weeny bit sexist,” just before they started the Fete Committee meeting last week. Cecilia couldn’t remember what she’d said, but she’d only been joking. Anyway, weren’t women allowed to be sexist for the next two thousand years or so, until they’d evened up the score? Maybe she was sexist. The kettle boiled. She swirled an Earl Grey tea bag and watched the curls of black spread through the water like ink. There were worse things to be than sexist. For example, you could be the sort of person who pinched your fingers together while using the word “teeny-weeny.” She looked at her tea and sighed. A glass of wine would be nice right now, but she’d given up alcohol for Lent. Only six days to go. She had a bottle of expensive Shiraz ready to open on Easter Sunday, when thirty-five adults and twenty-three children were coming to lunch, so she’d need it. Although she was an old hand at entertaining. She hosted Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Christmas. John-Paul had five younger brothers, all married with kids. So it was quite a crowd. Planning was the key. Meticulous planning. She picked up her tea and took it over to the table. Why did she give up wine for Lent? Polly was more sensible. She had given up strawberry jam. Cecilia had never seen Polly show more than a passing interest in strawberry jam, although now, of course, she was always catching her standing at the open fridge, staring at it longingly. The power of denial. “Esther!” she called out. Esther was in the next room with her sisters watching The Biggest Loser while they shared a giant bag of salt-and-vinegar chips left over from the Australia Day barbecue months earlier. Cecilia did not know why her three slender daughters loved watching overweight people sweat and cry and starve. It didn’t appear to be teaching them healthier eating habits. She should go in and confiscate the bag of chips, except they’d all eaten salmon and steamed broccoli for dinner without complaint, and she didn’t have the strength for an argument. She heard a voice from the television boom, “You get nothing for nothing!” That wasn’t such a bad sentiment for her daughters to hear. No one knew it better than Cecilia! But still, she didn’t like the expressions of faint revulsion that flitted across their smooth young faces. She was always so vigilant about not making negative body-image comments in front of her daughters, although the same could not be said for her friends. Just the other day, Miriam Oppenheimer had said, loud enough for all their impressionable daughters to hear, “God, would you look at my stomach!” and squeezed her flesh between her fingertips as if it were something vile. Great, Miriam, as if our daughters don’t already get a million messages every day telling them to hate their bodies . Actually, Miriam’s stomach was getting a little pudgy. “Esther!” she called out again. “What is it?” Esther called back, in a patient, put-upon voice that Cecilia suspected was an unconscious imitation of her own. “Whose idea was it to build the Berlin Wall?” “Well, they’re pretty sure it was Nikita Khrushchev’s!” Esther answered immediately, pronouncing the exotic-sounding name with great relish and her own peculiar interpretation of a Russian accent. “He was, like, the prime minister of Russia, except he was the premier. But it could have been—” Her sisters responded instantly with their usual impeccable courtesy. “Shut up, Esther!” “Esther! I can’t hear the television !” “Thank you, darling!” Cecilia sipped her tea and imagined herself going back through time and putting that Khrushchev in his place. No, Mr. Khrushchev, you may not have a wall. It will not prove that communism works. It will not work out well at all. Now, look, I agree capitalism isn’t the be-all and end-all! Let me show you my last credit card bill. But you really need to put your thinking cap back on . And then fifty-one years later, Cecilia wouldn’t have found this letter that was making her feel so . . . What was the word? Unfocused. That was it. She liked to feel focused. She was proud of her ability to focus. Her daily life was made up of a thousand tiny pieces—“Need coriander”; “Isabel’s haircut”; “Who will watch Polly at ballet on Tuesday while I take Esther to speech therapy?”—like one of those terrible giant jigsaws that Isabel used to spend hours doing. And yet Cecilia, who had no patience for puzzles, knew exactly where each tiny piece of her life belonged and where it needed to be slotted in next. And okay, maybe the life Cecilia was leading wasn’t that unusual or impressive. She was a school mum and a part-time Tupperware consultant, not an actress or an actuary or a . . . poet living in Vermont. (Cecilia had recently discovered that Liz Brogan, a girl from high school, was now a prizewinning poet living in Vermont. Liz, who ate cheese-and-Vegemite sandwiches and was always losing her bus pass. It took all of Cecilia’s considerable strength of character not to find that annoying. Not that she wanted to write poetry. But still. You would have thought that if anyone was going to lead an ordinary life, it would have been Liz Brogan.) Of course, Cecilia had never aspired to anything other than ordinariness. Here I am, a typical suburban mum, she sometimes caught herself thinking, as if someone had accused her of holding herself out to be something else, something superior. Other mothers talked about feeling overwhelmed, about the difficulties of focusing on one thing, and they were always saying, “How do you do it all, Cecilia?” and she didn’t know how to answer them. She didn’t actually understand what they found so difficult. But now, for some reason, something to do with this silly letter, everything felt somehow at risk. It wasn’t logical. Maybe it wasn’t anything to do with the letter. Maybe it was hormonal. She was “possibly perimenopausal,” according to Dr. McArthur. (“Oh, I am not !” Cecilia had said automatically, as if responding to a gentle, humorous insult.) Perhaps this was a case of that vague anxiety she knew some women experienced. Other women. She’d always thought anxious people were cute. Dear little anxious people like Sarah Sacks. She wanted to pat their worry-filled heads. Perhaps if she opened the letter and saw that it was nothing, she would get everything back in focus. She had things to do. Two baskets of laundry to fold. Three urgent phone calls to make. Gluten-free muffins to bake for the gluten-intolerant members of the School Website Project Group (i.e., Janine Davidson), which would be meeting tomorrow. There were other things besides the letter that could be making her feel anxious. The sex thing, for example. That was always at the back of her mind. She frowned and ran her hands down the sides of her waist. Her oblique muscles, according to her Pilates teacher. Oh, look, the sex thing was nothing . It was not actually on her mind. She refused to let it be on her mind. It was of no consequence. It was true, perhaps, that ever since that morning last year, she’d been aware of an underlying sense of fragility, a new understanding that a life of coriander and laundry could be stolen in an instant, that your ordinariness could vanish, and suddenly you’re a woman on your knees, your face lifted to the sky, and some women are running to help, but others are already averting their heads, with the words not articulated, but felt: Don’t let this touch me . Cecilia saw it again for the thousandth time: little Spider-Man flying. She was one of the women who ran. Well, of course she was, throwing open her car door, even though she knew that nothing she did could make any difference. It wasn’t her school, her neighborhood, her parish. None of her children had ever played with the little Spider-Man. She’d never had coffee with the woman on her knees. She just happened to be stopped at the lights on the other side of the intersection when it happened. A little boy, probably about five, dressed in a red and blue full-body Spider-Man suit was waiting at the side of the road, holding his mother’s hand. It was Book Week. That’s why the little boy was dressed up. Cecilia was watching him, thinking, Mmmm, actually Spider-Man is not a character from a book , when for no reason that she could see, the little boy dropped his mother’s hand and stepped off the curb into the traffic. Cecilia screamed. She also, she remembered later, instinctively banged her fist on her horn. If Cecilia had driven by just ten minutes later, or even five minutes later, she would have missed seeing it happen. The little boy’s death would have meant nothing more to her than another traffic detour. Now it was a memory that would probably cause her grandchildren to one day say, “Don’t hold my hand so tight , Grandma.” Obviously there was no connection between little Spider-Man and this letter. He just came into her mind at strange times. Cecilia flicked the letter across the table with her fingertip and picked up Esther’s library book: The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall . So, the Berlin Wall. Wonderful. The first she knew that the Berlin Wall was about to become a significant part of her life had been at breakfast this morning. It had been just Cecilia and Esther sitting at the kitchen table. John-Paul was overseas, in Chicago until Friday, and Isabel and Polly were still in bed. Cecilia didn’t normally sit down in the mornings. She generally ate her breakfast standing at the breakfast counter while she made lunches, checked her Tupperware orders on her iPad, unpacked the dishwasher, texted clients about their parties, whatever, but it was a rare opportunity to have some time alone with her odd, darling middle daughter, so she sat down with her Bircher muesli, while Esther powered her way through a bowl of rice bubbles, and waited. She’d learned that with her daughters. Don’t say a word. Don’t ask a question. Give them enough time and they’ll finally tell you what’s on their minds. It was like fishing. It took silence and patience. (Or so she’d heard. Cecilia would rather hammer nails into her forehead than go fishing.) Silence didn’t come naturally to her. Cecilia was a talker. “Seriously, do you ever shut the hell up?” an ex-boyfriend had said to her once. She talked a lot when she was nervous. That ex-boyfriend must have made her nervous. Although she also talked a lot when she was happy. But she didn’t say anything that morning. She just ate, and waited, and sure enough, Esther started talking. “Mum,” she said, in her husky, precise little voice with its faint lisp. “Did you know that some people escaped over the Berlin Wall in a hot-air balloon they made themselves?” “I did not know that,” said Cecilia, although she might have known it. So long, Titanic; hello, Berlin Wall, she thought. She would have preferred it if Esther had shared something with her about how she was feeling at the moment, any worries she had about school, her friends, questions about sex. But no, she wanted to talk about the Berlin Wall. Ever since Esther was three years old, she’d been developing these interests or, more accurately, obsessions. First it was dinosaurs. Sure, lots of kids are interested in dinosaurs, but Esther’s interest was, well, exhausting, to be frank, and a little peculiar. Nothing else interested the child. She drew dinosaurs, she played with dinosaurs, she dressed up as a dinosaur. “I’m not Esther,” she’d say. “I’m T. rex.” Every bedtime story had to be about dinosaurs. Every conversation had to be related somehow to dinosaurs. It was lucky that John-Paul was interested, because Cecilia was bored after about five minutes. (They were extinct! They had nothing to say!) John-Paul took Esther on special trips to the museum. He brought home books for her. He sat with her for hours while they talked about herbivores and carnivores. Since then Ether’s “interests” had ranged from roller coasters to cane toads. Most recently it had been the Titanic . Now that she was ten, she was old enough to do her own research at the library and online, and Cecilia was amazed at the information she gathered. What ten-year-old lay in bed reading historical books that were so big and chunky, she could barely hold them up? “Encourage it!” her schoolteachers said, but sometimes Cecilia worried. It seemed to her that Esther was possibly a touch autistic, or at least sitting somewhere on the autism spectrum. Although Cecilia’s mother had laughed when she mentioned her concern. “But Esther is exactly like you were!” she said. This was not true. “I actually have a piece of the Berlin Wall,” Cecilia had said that morning to Esther, suddenly remembering this fact, and it had been gratifying to see Esther’s eyes light up with interest. “I was there in Germany, after the Wall came down.” “Can I see it?” asked Esther. “You can have it, darling.” Jewelry and clothes for Isabel and Polly. A piece of the Berlin Wall for Esther. Cecilia, twenty years old at the time, had been on a six-week holiday traveling through Europe with her friend Sarah Sacks in 1990, just a few months after the announcement that the Wall was coming down. (Sarah’s famous indecisiveness paired with Cecilia’s famous decisiveness made them the perfect traveling companions. No conflict whatsoever.) When they got to Berlin, they found tourists lined along the Wall, trying to chip off pieces as souvenirs using keys, rocks, anything they could find. The Wall was like a giant carcass of a dragon that had once terrorized the city, and the tourists were crows pecking away at its remains. Without proper tools it was almost impossible to chip off a proper piece, so Cecilia and Sarah (well, Cecilia) decided to buy their pieces from the enterprising locals who had set out rugs and were selling a variety of offerings. Capitalism really had triumphed. You could buy anything from gray-colored chips the size of marbles to giant boulder-size chunks complete with spray-painted graffiti. Cecilia couldn’t remember how much she had paid for the tiny gray stone that looked like it could have come from anyone’s front garden. “It probably did,” said Sarah as they caught the train out of Berlin that night, and they’d laughed at their own gullibility, but at least they’d felt like they were a part of history. Cecilia had put her chip in a paper bag and written “MY PIECE OF THE BERLIN WALL” on the front, and when she came back to Australia she’d thrown it in a box with all the other souvenirs she’d collected: drink coasters, train tickets, menus, foreign coins, hotel keys. Cecilia wished now she’d concentrated more on the Wall, taken more photos, collected more anecdotes she could have shared with Esther. Actually, what she remembered most about that trip to Berlin was kissing a handsome, brown-haired German boy in a nightclub. He kept taking ice cubes from his drink and running them across her collarbone, which at the time had seemed incredibly sexy, but now seemed unhygienic and sticky. If only she’d been the sort of curious, politically aware girl who had struck up conversations with the locals about what it had been like living in the shadow of the Wall. Instead, all she had to share with her daughter were stories about kissing and ice cubes. Of course, Isabel and Polly would love to hear about the kissing and ice cubes. Or Polly would; maybe Isabel had reached the age where the thought of her mother kissing anybody would be appalling. Cecilia had put “Find piece of Berlin Wall for E” on her list of things to do that day (there were twenty-five items—she used an iPhone app to list them), and at about two p.m., she had gone into the attic to find it. “Attic” was probably too generous a word for the storage area in their roof space. You reached it by pulling down a ladder from a trapdoor in the ceiling. Once she was up there, she had to keep her knees bent so as not to bang her head. John-Paul point-blank refused to go up there. He suffered from terrible claustrophobia and walked six flights of stairs every day to his office so he could avoid taking the elevator. The poor man had regular nightmares about being trapped in a room where the walls were contracting. “The walls!” he’d shout, just before he woke up, sweaty and wild-eyed. “Do you think you were locked in a cupboard as a child?” Cecilia had asked him once (she wouldn’t have put it past his mother), but he said he was pretty sure he wasn’t. “Actually, John-Paul never had nightmares when he was a little boy,” his mother had told Cecilia when she asked. “He was a beautiful sleeper. Perhaps you give him too much rich food late at night?” Cecilia was used to the nightmares now. The attic was small and crammed, but tidy and well organized, of course. Over recent years, “organized” seemed to have become her most defining characteristic. It was like she was a minor celebrity with this one claim to fame. It was funny how once it became a thing that her family and friends commented on and teased her about, it seemed to perpetuate itself, so that her life was now extraordinarily well organized, as if motherhood were a sport and she were a top athlete. It was like she was thinking, How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control? And that was why other people, like her sister, had rooms full of dusty junk, whereas Cecilia’s attic was stacked with clearly labeled white plastic storage containers. The only part that didn’t look quite Cecilia-ish was the tower of shoe boxes in the corner. They were John-Paul’s. He liked to keep each financial year’s receipts in a different shoe box. It was something he’d been doing for years, before he met Cecilia. He was proud of his shoe boxes, so she managed to restrain herself from telling him that a filing cabinet would be a far more effective use of space. Thanks to her labeled storage containers, she found her piece of the Berlin Wall almost straightaway. She peeled off the lid of the container marked “Cecilia: Travel/Souvenirs. 1985–1990,” and there it was in its faded brown paper bag. Her little piece of history. She took out the piece of rock (cement?) and held it in her palm. It was even smaller than she remembered. It didn’t look especially impressive, but hopefully it would be enough for the reward of one of Esther’s rare, lopsided little smiles. You had to work hard for a smile from Esther. Then Cecilia let herself get distracted (yes, she achieved a lot every day, but she wasn’t a machine , she did sometimes fritter away a little time) looking through the box and laughing at the photo of herself with the German boy who did the ice cube thing. He, like her piece of the Berlin Wall, wasn’t quite as impressive as she remembered. Then the house phone rang, startling her out of the past, and she stood up too fast and banged the side of her head painfully against the ceiling. The walls, the walls! She swore, reeled back, and her elbow knocked against John-Paul’s tower of shoe boxes. At least three lost their lids and their contents, causing a mini landslide of paperwork. This was precisely why the shoe boxes were not such a good idea. Cecilia swore again and rubbed her head, which really did hurt. She looked at the shoe boxes and saw that they were all for financial years dating back to the eighties. She began stuffing the pile of receipts into one of the boxes when her eye was caught by her own name on a white business envelope. She picked it up and saw that it was John-Paul’s handwriting. It said: For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick To be opened only in the event of my death She laughed out loud, and then abruptly stopped, as if she were at a party and she’d laughed at something somebody said and then realized that it wasn’t a joke, it was actually quite serious. She read it again—“For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick”—and oddly, for just a moment, she’d felt her cheeks go warm, like she was embarrassed. For him or for her? She wasn’t sure. It felt like she’d stumbled upon something shameful, as if she’d caught him masturbating in the shower. (Miriam Oppenheimer had once caught Doug masturbating in the shower. It was just so dreadful that they all knew that, but once Miriam was on to her second glass of champagne, the secrets just bubbled out of her, and once they knew it was impossible to un-know it.) What did it say ? She considered tearing it open right that second, before she had time to think about it, like the way she sometimes (not very often) shoved the last piece of chocolate in her mouth, before her conscience had time to catch up with her greed. The phone rang again. She wasn’t wearing her watch, and suddenly she felt like she’d lost all sense of time. She threw the rest of the paperwork back into one of the shoe boxes and took the piece of the Berlin Wall and the letter back downstairs. As soon as she left the attic, she was picked up and swept along by the fast-running current of her life. There was a big Tupperware order to deliver, the girls to be picked up from school, the fish to be bought for tonight’s dinner (they ate a lot of fish when John-Paul was away for work because he hated it), phone calls to return. The parish priest, Father Joe, had been calling to remind her that it was Sister Ursula’s funeral tomorrow. There seemed to be some concern about numbers. She would go, of course. She left John-Paul’s mysterious letter on top of the fridge, and gave Esther the piece of the Berlin Wall just before they sat down for dinner. “Thank you.” Esther handled the little piece of rock with touching reverence. “Exactly which part of the Wall did it come from?” “Well, I think it was quite near Checkpoint Charlie,” said Cecilia with jolly confidence. She had no idea. But I can tell you that boy with the ice cube wore a red T-shirt and white jeans and he picked up my ponytail and held it between his fingertips and said, “Very pretty.” “Is it worth any money?” asked Polly. “I doubt it. How could you prove it really was from the Wall?” asked Isabel. “It just looks like a piece of rock.” “DMA testing,” said Polly. The child watched far too much television. “It’s D N A, not DMA, and that comes from people,” said Esther. “I know that!” Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her. “Well, then why—” “So who do you reckon is going to get voted off The Biggest Loser tonight?” asked Cecilia, while simultaneously thinking, Why, yes, whoever that is observing my life, I am changing the subject from a fascinating period of modern history that might actually teach my children something to a trashy television show that will teach them nothing, but will keep the peace and not make my head hurt. If John-Paul had been at home, she probably wouldn’t have changed the subject. She was a far better mother when she had an audience. The girls talked about The Biggest Loser for the rest of dinner, while Cecilia pretended to be interested and thought about the letter sitting on top of the fridge. Once the table was cleared and the girls were all watching TV, she took it down to stare at it. Now she put down her cup of tea and held the envelope up to the light, half laughing at herself. It looked like a handwritten letter on lined notebook paper. She couldn’t decipher a word. Had John-Paul perhaps seen something on television about how the soldiers in Afghanistan wrote letters to their families to be sent in the event of their deaths, like messages from the grave, and had he thought that it might be nice to do something similar? She just couldn’t imagine him sitting down to do such a thing. It was so sentimental. Lovely though. If he died, he wanted them to know how much he loved them. “. . . in the event of my death.” Why was he thinking about death? Was he sick? But this letter appeared to have been written a long time ago, and he was still alive. Besides, he’d had a checkup a few weeks back, and Dr. Kluger had said he was as “fit as a stallion.” He’d spent the next few days tossing his head back and whinnying and neighing around the house, while Polly rode on his back swinging a tea towel around her head like a whip. Cecilia smiled at the memory, and her anxiety dissipated. So a few years ago, John-Paul had done something uncharacteristically sentimental and written this letter. It was nothing to get all worked up about, and of course she shouldn’t open it just for the sake of curiosity. She looked at the clock. Nearly eight p.m. He’d be calling soon. He generally called around this time each night when he was away. She wasn’t even going to mention the letter to him. It would embarrass him, and it wasn’t really an appropriate topic of conversation for the phone. One thing: How exactly was she meant to have found this letter if he had died? She might never have found it! Why hadn’t he given it to their solicitor, Miriam’s husband, Doug Oppenheimer? So difficult not to think of him in the shower every time he came to mind. Of course it had no bearing on his abilities as a lawyer; perhaps it said more about Miriam’s abilities in the bedroom. (Cecilia had a mildly competitive relationship with Miriam.) Of course, given the current circumstances, now was not the time to be feeling smug about sex. Stop it. Do not think about the sex thing. Anyway, it was dumb of John-Paul not to have given the letter to Doug. If he’d died she probably would have thrown out all his shoe boxes in one of her decluttering frenzies without even bothering to go through them. If he’d wanted her to find the letter, it was crazy to just shove it in a random shoe box. Why not put it in the file with the copies of their wills, life insurance and so on? John-Paul was one of the smartest people she knew, except when it came to the logistics of life. “I seriously don’t understand how men came to rule the world,” she’d said to her sister, Bridget, this morning, after she’d told her about how John-Paul had lost his rental car keys in Chicago. It had driven Cecilia bananas seeing that text message from him. There was nothing she could do! This type of thing was always happening to John-Paul. Last time he went overseas he’d left his laptop in a cab. The man lost things constantly. Wallets, phones, keys, his wedding ring. His possessions just slid right off him. “They’re pretty good at building stuff,” her sister said. “Like bridges and roads. I mean, could you even build a hut? Your basic mud hut?” “I could build a hut,” said Cecilia. “You probably could,” groaned Bridget, as if this were a failing. “Anyway, men don’t rule the world. We have a female prime minister. And you rule your world. You rule the Fitzpatrick household. You rule St. Angela’s. You rule the world of Tupperware.” Cecilia was president of St. Angela’s Primary Parents and Friends Association. She was also the eleventh top-selling Tupperware consultant in Australia. Her sister found both of these roles hugely comical. “I don’t rule the Fitzpatrick household,” said Cecilia. “Sure you don’t,” guffawed Bridget. It was true that if Cecilia died, the Fitzpatrick household would just . . . Well, it was unbearable to think about what would happen. John-Paul would need more than a letter from her. He’d need a whole manual, including a floor plan of the house pointing out the locations of the laundry and the linen cupboard. The phone rang, and she snatched it up. “Let me guess. Our daughters are watching the chubby people, right?” said John-Paul. She’d always loved his voice on the phone: deep, warm and comforting. Oh, yes, her husband was hopeless, and lost things and ran late, but he took care of his wife and daughters, in that old-fashioned, responsible, I-am-the-man-and-this-is-my-job way. Bridget was right: Cecilia ruled her world, but she’d always known that if there was a crisis—a crazed gunman, a flood, a fire—John-Paul would be the one to save their lives. He’d throw himself in front of the bullet, build the raft, drive them safely through the raging inferno, and once that was done, he’d hand back control to Cecilia, pat his pockets and say, “Has anyone seen my wallet?” After she saw the little Spider-Man die, the first thing she did was call John-Paul, her fingers shaking as she pressed the buttons. “I found this letter,” said Cecilia. She ran her fingertips over his handwriting on the front of the envelope. As soon as she heard his voice, she knew she was going to ask him about it that very second. They’d been married for fifteen years. There had never been secrets. “What letter?” “A letter from you,” said Cecilia. She was trying to sound light, jokey, so that this whole situation would stay in the right perspective, so that whatever was in the letter would mean nothing, would change nothing. “To me, to be opened in the event of your death.” It was impossible to use the words “event of your death” to your husband without your voice coming out odd. There was silence. For a moment she thought they’d been cut off, except that she could hear a gentle hum of chatter and clatter in the background. It sounded like he was calling from a restaurant. Her stomach contracted. “John-Paul?” TWO If this is a joke,” said Tess, “it’s not funny.” Will put his hand on her arm. Felicity put her hand on her other arm. They were like matching bookends holding her up. “We’re so very, very sorry,” said Felicity. “So sorry,” echoed Will, as if they were singing a duet together. They were sitting at the big round wooden table they used for client meetings, but mostly for eating pizza. Will’s face was dead white. Tess could see each tiny black hair of his stubble in sharp definition, standing upright, like some sort of miniature crop growing across his shockingly white skin. Felicity had three distinct red blotches on her neck. For a moment Tess was transfixed by those three blotches, as if they held the answer. They looked like fingerprints on Felicity’s brand-new slender neck. Finally, Tess raised her eyes and saw that Felicity’s eyes—her famously beautiful almond-shaped green eyes; The fat girl has such beautiful eyes! —were red and watery. “So this realization,” said Tess. “This realization that you two . . .” She stopped. Swallowed. “We want you to know that nothing has actually happened,” interrupted Felicity. “We haven’t—you know,” said Will. “You haven’t slept together.” Tess saw that they were both proud of this, that they almost expected her to admire them for their restraint. “Absolutely not,” said Will. “But you want to,” said Tess. She was almost laughing at the absurdity of it. “That’s what you’re telling me, right? You want to sleep together.” They must have kissed. That was worse than if they’d slept together. Everyone knew that a stolen kiss was the most erotic thing in the world. The blotches on Felicity’s neck began to slink up her jawline. She looked like she was coming down with a rare infectious disease. “We’re so sorry,” said Will again. “We tried so hard to—to make it not happen.” “We really did,” said Felicity. “For months, you know, we just—” “Months? This has been going on for months!” “Nothing has actually gone on,” intoned Will, as solemnly as if he were in church. “Well, something has gone on,” said Tess. “Something rather significant has gone on.” Who knew she was capable of speaking with such hardness? Each word sounded like a block of concrete. “Sorry,” said Will. “Of course—I just meant—you know.” Felicity pressed her fingertips to her forehead and began to weep. “Oh, Tess.” Tess’s hand went out of its own accord to comfort her. They were closer than sisters. She always told people that. Their mothers were twins, and Felicity and Tess were only children, born within six months of each other. They’d done everything together. Tess had once punched a boy—a proper closed-fist right hook across the jaw—because he called Felicity a baby elephant, which was exactly what Felicity had looked like all through her school days. Felicity had grown into a fat adult, “a big girl with a pretty face.” She drank Coke like it was water and never dieted or exercised or seemed particularly bothered by her weight. And then, about six months ago, Felicity had joined Weight Watchers, given up Coke, joined a gym, lost forty kilos and turned beautiful. Extremely beautiful. She was exactly the type of person they wanted for that Biggest Loser show: a stunning woman trapped in a fat person’s body. Tess had been thrilled for her. “Maybe she’ll meet someone really nice now,” she’d said to Will. “Now that she’s got more confidence.” It seemed that Felicity had met someone really nice. Will. The nicest man Tess knew. That took a lot of confidence, to steal your cousin’s husband. “I’m so sorry, I just want to die,” wept Felicity. Tess pulled back her hand. Felicity—snarky, sarcastic, funny, clever, fat Felicity—sounded like an American cheerleader. Will tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling with a clenched jaw. He was trying not to cry too. The last time Tess had seen him cry was when Liam was born. Tess’s eyes were dry. Her heart hammered as if she were terrified, as if her life were in danger. The phone rang. “Leave it,” said Will. “It’s after hours.” Tess stood, went over to her desk and picked up the phone. “TWF Advertising,” she said. “Tess, my love, I know it’s late, but we’ve got us a little problem.” It was Dirk Freeman, marketing director of Petra Pharmaceuticals, their most important and best-paying client. It was Tess’s job to make Dirk feel important, to reassure him that although he was fifty-six and was never going to climb any higher in the ranks of senior management, he was the big kahuna and Tess was his servant, his maid, his lowly chambermaid, in fact, and he could tell her what to do and be flirty, or grumpy, or stern, and she’d pretend to give him a bit of lip, but when it came down to it, she had to do what he said . It had occurred to her recently that the service she was providing Dirk Freeman bordered on sexual. “The color of the dragon on the Cough Stop packaging is all wrong,” said Dirk. “It’s too purple. Much too purple. Have we gone to print?” Yes, they’d gone to print. Fifty thousand little cardboard boxes had rolled off the presses that day. Fifty thousand perfectly purple, toothily grinning dragons. The work that had gone into those dragons. The e-mails, the discussions. And while Tess was talking about dragons, Will and Felicity were falling in love. “No,” said Tess, her eyes on her husband and cousin, who were both still sitting at the meeting table in the center of the room, their heads bowed, examining their fingertips, like teenagers in detention. “It’s your lucky day, Dirk.” “Oh, I thought it would have—well, good.” He could barely hide his disappointment. He’d wanted Tess all breathless and worried. He’d wanted to hear the tremor of panic in her voice. His voiced deepened, became as abrupt and authoritative as if he were about to lead his troops onto the battlefield. “I need you to hold everything on Cough Stop, right? The lot. Got it?” “Got it. Hold everything on Cough Stop.” “I’ll get back to you.” He hung up. There was nothing wrong with the color. He’d call back the next day and say it was fine. He’d just needed to feel powerful for a few minutes. One of the younger hotshots had just made him feel inferior in a meeting. “The Cough Stop boxes went to print today.” Felicity turned in her seat and looked worriedly at Tess. “It’s fine,” said Tess. “But if he’s going to change—” said Will. “I said it’s fine.” She didn’t feel angry yet. Not really. But she could feel the possibility of a fury worse than anything she’d ever experienced, a simmering vat of anger that could explode like a fireball, destroying everything in its sight. She didn’t sit down again. Instead she turned and examined the whiteboard where they recorded all their work in progress. Cough Stop packaging!!! Bedstuff website It was humiliating to see her own scrawly, carefree, confident handwriting with its flippant exclamation marks. The smiley face next to the Bedstuff website, because they’d worked so hard to get that job, pitching against bigger companies, and then, yes! They’d won it. She’d drawn that smiley face yesterday, when she was ignorant of the secret that Will and Felicity were sharing. Had they exchanged rueful looks behind her back when she’d drawn the smiley face? She won’t be so smiley-faced once we confess our little secret, will she? The phone rang again. This time Tess let it go to the answering service. TWF Advertising. Their names entwined together to form their little dream business. The idle “what if” conversation they’d actually made happen. The Christmas before last they’d been in Sydney for the holiday. As was traditional, they spent Christmas Eve at Felicity’s parents’ house. Tess’s Aunt Mary and Uncle Phil. Felicity was still fat. Pretty and pink and perspiring in a size eighteen dress. They had the traditional sausages on the barbecue, the traditional creamy pasta salad, the traditional pavlova. She and Felicity and Will had all been whining about their jobs. Incompetent management. Stupid colleagues. Drafty offices. And so on and so forth. “Geez, you’re a miserable bunch, aren’t you?” said Uncle Phil, who didn’t have anything to whine about now that he was retired. “Why don’t you go into business together?” said Tess’s mother. It was true that they were all in similar fields. Tess was the marketing communications manager for a but-this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it legal publishing company. Will was the creative director of a large, prestigious, extremely pleased with themselves advertising agency. (That’s how they’d met. Tess had been Will’s client.) Felicity was a graphic designer working for a nasty tyrant. Once they’d started talking about it, the ideas had fallen into place so fast. Click, click, click! By the time they were eating the last mouthfuls of pavlova, it was all set. Will would be the creative director! Obviously! Felicity would be the art director! Of course! Tess would be the account executive! That one wasn’t quite so obvious. She’d never held a role like that. She’d always been on the client side, and she considered herself something of a social introvert. In fact, a few weeks ago she’d done a Reader’s Digest quiz in a doctor’s waiting room called “Do You Suffer from Social Anxiety?” and her answers (all C ’s) confirmed that she did, in fact, suffer from social anxiety and should seek professional help or “join a support group.” Everybody who did that quiz probably got the same result. If you didn’t suspect you had social anxiety, you wouldn’t bother doing the quiz; you’d be too busy chatting with the receptionist. She certainly did not seek professional help, nor tell a single soul. Not Will. Not even Felicity. If she talked about it, then it would make it real. The two of them would watch her in social situations and be kindly empathetic when they saw the humiliating evidence of her shyness. The important thing was to cover it up . When she was a child her mother had once told her shyness was almost a form of selfishness. “You see, when you hang your head like that, darling, people think you don’t like them!” Tess had taken that to heart. She grew up and learned how to make small talk with a thumping heart. She forced herself to make eye contact, even when her nerves were screaming at her to look away, look away! “Bit of a cold,” she’d say to explain away the dryness of her throat. She learned to live with it, the way other people learned to live with lactose intolerance or sensitive skin. Anyway, Tess wasn’t overly concerned that Christmas Eve two years ago. It was all just talk, and they’d been drinking a lot of Aunt Mary’s punch. They weren’t really going to start a business together. She wouldn’t really have to be the account executive. But then, in the new year, when they got back to Melbourne, Will and Felicity had kept going on about it. Will and Tess’s house had a huge downstairs area that the previous owners had used as a teenagers’ retreat. It had its own separate entrance. What did they have to lose? The start-up costs would be negligible. Will and Tess had been putting extra money on their mortgage. Felicity was sharing an apartment. If they failed, they could all go back out and get jobs. Tess had been swept along on the wave of their enthusiasm. She’d been happy enough to resign from her job, but the first time she sat outside a potential client’s office, she had to cram her hands between her knees to stop them from trembling. Often she could actually feel her head wobbling. Even now, after eighteen months, she still suffered debilitating nerves each time she met a new client. Yet she was oddly successful in her role. “You’re different from other agency people,” one client told her at the end of their first meeting, as he shook her hand to seal the deal. “You actually listen more than you talk.” The horrible nerves were balanced by the glorious euphoria she felt each time she walked out of a meeting. It was like walking on air. She’d done it again. She’d battled the monster and won. And best of all, nobody suspected her secret. She brought in the clients. The business flourished. A product launch they did for a cosmetics company had even been nominated for a marketing award. Tess’s role meant that she was often out of the office, leaving Will and Felicity alone for hours at a time. If someone had asked her if that worried her, she would have laughed. “Felicity is like a sister to Will,” she would have said. She turned from the whiteboard. Her legs felt weak. She went and sat back down, choosing a chair at the other end of the table from them. She tried to get her bearings. It was six o’clock on a Monday night. She was right in the middle of her life. There had been so many other things distracting her when Will came upstairs and said he and Felicity needed to talk to her about something. Tess had just put down the phone from speaking with her mother, who had rung to say she’d broken her ankle playing tennis. She was going to be on crutches for the next eight weeks, and she was very sorry, but could Easter be in Sydney instead of Melbourne this year? It was the first time in the fifteen years since Tess and Felicity had moved interstate that Tess had felt bad about not living closer to her mother. “We’ll get a flight straight after school on Thursday,” Tess had said. “Can you cope until then?” “Oh, I’ll be fine. Mary will help. And the neighbors.” But Aunt Mary didn’t drive, and Uncle Phil couldn’t be expected to drive her over every day. Besides, Mary and Phil were both starting to look frail themselves. And Tess’s mother’s neighbors were ancient old ladies or busy young families who barely had time to wave hello as they backed their big cars out of their driveways. It didn’t seem likely that they’d be bringing over casseroles. Tess had been fretting over whether she should book a flight to Sydney for the very next day, and then perhaps organize a home helper for her mother. Lucy would hate to have a stranger in the house, but how would she shower? How would she cook? It was tricky. They had so much work on, and she didn’t like to leave Liam. He wasn’t quite himself. There was a boy in his class, Marcus, who was giving him grief. He wasn’t exactly bullying him; that would have been nice and clear-cut and they could have followed the school’s sternly bullet-pointed “We Take a Zero-Tolerance Approach to Bullying” code of practice. Marcus was more complicated than that. He was a charming little psychopath. Something new and awful had gone on with Marcus that day at school, Tess was sure of it. She’d been giving Liam his dinner while Will and Felicity were downstairs working. Most nights she and Will and Liam, and often Felicity too, managed to eat as a family, but the Bedstuff website was meant to go live that Friday, so they were all working long hours. Liam had been quieter than usual while he was eating his dinner. He was a dreamy, reflective little boy; he’d never been a chatterbox, but there had been something so grown-up and sad about the way he mechanically speared each piece of sausage with his fork and dunked it in the tomato sauce. “Did you play with Marcus today?” Tess had asked. “Nah,” said Liam. “Today’s Monday.” “So what?” But he’d closed down and refused to say another word about it, and Tess had felt rage fill her heart. She needed to talk to his teacher again. She had the strongest feeling that her child was in an abusive relationship and nobody could see it. The school playground was like a battlefield. That’s what had been on Tess’s mind when Will had asked her if she’d come downstairs: her mother’s ankle and Marcus. Will and Felicity were sitting at the meeting table waiting for her. Before Tess joined them, she collected all the coffee mugs that were sitting around the office. Felicity had a habit of making herself fresh cups of coffee that she never finished. Tess put the mugs in a row on the meeting table and said, as she sat down, “New record, Felicity. Five half-drunk cups.” Felicity hadn’t said anything. She looked oddly at Tess, as if she felt really bad about the coffee cups, and then Will made his extraordinary announcement. “Tess, I don’t know how to say this,” he said. “But Felicity and I have fallen in love.” “Very funny.” Tess had grouped the coffee cups together and smiled. “Hilarious.” But it seemed it wasn’t a joke. Now she studied her hands on the honey-gold pine of the desk. Her pale, blue-veined, knuckly hands. An ex-boyfriend had once told her that he was in love with her hands. Will had a lot of trouble getting the wedding ring over her knuckle at their wedding. Their guests had laughed softly. Will had pretended to exhale with relief once he got it on, while he secretly caressed her hand. Tess looked up and saw Will and Felicity exchange covert worried glances. “So it’s true love, is it?” said Tess. “You’re soul mates , are you?” A nerve throbbed in Will’s cheek. Felicity tugged at her hair. Yes. That’s what they were both thinking. Yes, it is true love. Yes, we are soul mates. “When exactly did this start?” she asked. “When did these feelings between you develop?” “That doesn’t matter,” said Will hurriedly. “It matters to me !” Tess’s voice rose. “I guess, I’m not sure, maybe, about six months ago?” mumbled Felicity, looking at the desk. “So when you started to lose weight,” said Tess. Felicity shrugged. Tess said to Will, “Funny that you never looked twice at her when she was fat.” The bitter taste of nastiness flooded her mouth. How long since she’d let herself say something that was purely nasty? Not since she was a teenager. She had never called Felicity fat. Never said a critical word about her weight. “Tess, please . . .” said Will, without any censure in his voice, just a soft, desperate pleading. “It’s fine,” said Felicity. “I deserve it. We deserve it.” She lifted her chin and looked at Tess with naked, brave humility. So Tess was going to be allowed to kick and scratch as much as she wanted. They were just going to sit there and take it for as long as it took. They weren’t going to fight back. Will and Felicity were fundamentally good. She knew this. They were good people, and that’s why they were going to be so nice about this, so understanding and accepting of Tess’s rage, so that in the end Tess would be the bad person, not them. They hadn’t actually slept together, they hadn’t betrayed her. They’d fallen in love! It wasn’t an ordinary grubby little affair. It was fate. Predestined. Nobody could think that badly of them. It was genius. “Why didn’t you tell me on your own?” Tess tried to lock eyes with Will, as if the strength of her gaze could bring him back from wherever he’d gone. His eyes, his strange hazel eyes, the color of beaten copper, with thick black eyelashes, eyes that were so different from Tess’s own run-of-the-mill pale blue ones; the eyes that her son had inherited and that Tess thought of now as somehow belonging to her, a beloved possession for which she gracefully accepted compliments: “Your son has lovely eyes.” “He gets them from my husband. Nothing to do with me.” But everything to do with her. Hers. They were hers . Will’s gold eyes were normally amused; he was always ready to laugh at the world, he found day-to-day life generally pretty funny. It was one of the things she loved about him most. But right now they were looking at her imploringly, the way Liam looked at her when he wanted something at the supermarket. Please, Mum, I want that sugary treat with all the preservatives and the cleverly branded packaging and I know I promised I wouldn’t ask for anything but I want it. Please, Tess, I want your delicious-looking cousin and I know I promised to be true to you in good times and bad, in sickness and health, but pleeeease. No. You may not have her. I said no. “We couldn’t work out the right time or the right place,” said Will. “And we both wanted to tell you. We couldn’t—and then we just thought, we couldn’t go any longer without you knowing—so we just . . .” His jaw shifted, turkeylike, in and out, back and forth. “We thought there would never be a good time for a conversation like this.” We. They were a “we.” They’d talked about this. Without her. Well, of course they’d talked without her. They’d fallen in love without her. “I thought I should be here too,” said Felicity. “Did you, now?” said Tess. She couldn’t bear to look at Felicity. “So what happens next?” Asking the question filled her with a fresh nauseated wave of disbelief. Surely nothing was going to happen. Surely Felicity would rush off to one of her new gym classes and Will would come upstairs and talk to Liam while he had his bath, maybe get to the bottom of the Marcus problem, while Tess cooked a stir-fry for dinner; she had the ingredients ready. It was too bizarre, thinking of the little plastic-wrapped tray of chicken strips sitting staidly in the refrigerator. Surely she and Will were still going to have a glass of that half-empty bottle of wine and talk about potential men for the brand-new, slender Felicity. They’d already canvassed so many possibilities. Their Italian bank manager. The big quiet guy who supplied all their gourmet jams. Never once had Will slapped his hand to his forehead and said, “Of course! How could I have missed it? Me! I’d be perfect for her!” It was a joke. She couldn’t stop thinking that the whole thing was a terrible joke. “We know nothing can make this easy, or right, or better,” said Will. “But we’ll do whatever you want, whatever you think is right for you and for Liam.” “For Liam,” repeated Tess, dumbstruck. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to her that Liam would have to be told about this, that Liam would have anything to do with it, or be in any way affected. Liam, who was upstairs right now, lying on his stomach, watching television, his six-year-old little mind filled with giant-sized worries of Marcus. No, she thought. No, no, no. Absolutely not. She saw her mother appearing at her bedroom door. “Daddy and I want to talk to you about something.” It would not happen to Liam the way it had happened to her. Over her dead body. It was the one thing she’d always known she could and would spare him from. Her beautiful, grave-faced little boy would not feel the loss and confusion she’d felt that awful summer all those years ago. He would not pack a little overnight bag every second Friday. He would not have to check a calendar on the refrigerator to see where he was sleeping each weekend. He would not learn to think before he spoke whenever one parent asked a seemingly innocuous question about the other. Her mind raced. All that mattered now was Liam. Her own feelings were irrelevant. How could she save this? How could she stop it? “We never, ever meant for this to happen.” Will’s eyes were big and guileless. “And we want to do this the right way. The best way for all of us. We even wondered—” Tess saw Felicity shake her head slightly at Will. “You even wondered what?” said Tess. Here was more evidence of their talking. She could imagine the enjoyable intensity of these conversations. Teary eyes demonstrating what good people they were, how they were suffering at the thought of hurting Tess, but what choice did they have in the face of their passion, their love? “It’s too soon to talk about what we’re going to do.” Felicity’s voice was firmer suddenly. Tess’s fingernails dug into her palms. How dare she? How dare she talk in her normal voice, as if this were a normal situation, a normal problem? “You even wondered what ?” Tess kept her eyes on Will. Forget about Felicity, she told herself. You don’t have time to feel angry. Think, Tess, think. Will’s face went from white to red. “We wondered if it would be possible for all of us to live together. Here. For Liam’s sake. It’s not like this is a normal breakup. We’re all . . . family. So that’s why we thought, I mean, maybe it’s crazy, but we just thought it might be possible. Eventually.” Tess guffawed. A hard, almost guttural sound. Were they out of their minds? “You mean, I just move out of my bedroom and Felicity moves in? So we just say to Liam, ‘Don’t worry, honey, Daddy sleeps with Felicity now and Mummy is in the spare room’?” Felicity looked mortified. “Of course not.” “When you put it like that—” began Will. “But what other way is there to put it?” Will exhaled. He leaned forward. “Look,” he said. “We don’t need to work anything out right this second.” Sometimes Will used a particularly masculine, reasonable but authoritative tone in the office when he wanted things done a certain way. Tess and Felicity gave him absolute hell about it. He was using that tone now, as if it was time to get things under control. How dare he? Tess lifted her closed fists and slammed them down so hard on the table that it rattled. She’d never done such a thing before. It felt farcical and absurd and somewhat thrilling. She was pleased to see both Will and Felicity flinch. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” she said, because all at once it was perfectly clear. It was simple. Will and Felicity needed to have a proper affair. The sooner, the better. This smoldering thing they had going had to run its course. At the moment it was sweet and sexy. They were star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet gazing soulfully at each other over the purple Cough Stop dragon. It needed to get sweaty and sticky and sleazy and eventually—hopefully, God willing—banal and dull. Will loved his son, and once the fog of lust cleared, he’d see that he’d made a ghastly but not irretrievable, mistake. This could all be fixed. The only way forward was for Tess to leave. Right now. “Liam and I will go and stay in Sydney,” she said. “With Mum. She called just a minute ago to say she’s broken her ankle. She needs someone there to help her.” “Oh, no! How? Is she okay?” said Felicity. Tess ignored her. Felicity didn’t get to be the caring niece anymore. She was the other woman. Tess was the wife. And she was going to fight this. For Liam’s sake. She would fight it and she would win. “We’ll stay with her until her ankle is better.” “But, Tess, you can’t take Liam to live in Sydney .” Will’s bossy tone vanished. He was a Melbourne boy. There had never been any question that they would live anywhere else. He looked at Tess with a wounded expression, as if he were Liam being unjustly told off for something . Then his brow cleared. “What about school?” he said. “He can’t miss school.” Read more

Everything I Never Told You

Review “If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now . . . Ng has set two tasks in this novel’s doubled heart—to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime. She does both by turning the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of secrets the family members won’t share . . . What emerges is a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle. This is, in the end, a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind—a burden you do not always survive.” — Alexander Chee, bestselling author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night “Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family, Ng’s explosive debut chronicles the plight of Marilyn and James Lee after their favored daughter is found dead in a lake.” — Entertainment Weekly “Excellent . . . an accomplished debut . . . heart-wrenching . . . Ng deftly pulls together the strands of this complex, multigenerational novel. Everything I Never Told You is an engaging work that casts a powerful light on the secrets that have kept an American family together—and that finally end up tearing it apart.” — Los Angeles Times “Tender and merciless all at once . . . Vital in all the essential ways.” —Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing , A National Book Award winner “Wonderfully moving . . . Emotionally precise . . . A beautifully crafted study of dysfunction and grief . . . [This book] will resonate with anyone who has ever had a family drama.” — Boston Globe “A powerhouse of a debut novel, a literary mystery crafted out of shimmering prose and precise, painful observation about racial barriers, the burden of familial expectations, and the basic human thirst for belonging . . . Ng’s novel grips readers from page one with the hope of unraveling the mystery behind Lydia’s death—and boy does it deliver, on every front.” — Huffington Post “A subtle meditation on gender, race and the weight of one generation’s unfulfilled ambitions upon the shoulders—and in the heads—of the next . . . Ng deftly and convincingly illustrates the degree to which some miscommunications can never quite be rectified.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Cleverly crafted, emotionally perceptive . . . Ng sensitively dramatizes issues of gender and race that lie at the heart of the story . . . Ng’s themes of assimilation are themselves deftly interlaced into a taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” — O, The Oprah Magazine “Ng moves gracefully back and forth in time, into the aftermath of the tragedy as well as the distant past, and into the consciousness of each member of the family, creating a series of mysteries and revelations that lead back to the original question: what happened to Lydia? . . . Ng is masterful in her use of the omniscient narrator, achieving both a historical distance and visceral intimacy with each character’s struggles and failures . . . On the surface, Ng’s storylines are nothing new. There is a mysterious death, a family pulled apart by misunderstanding and grief, a struggle to fit into the norms of society, yet in the weaving of these threads she creates a work of ambitious complexity. In the end, this novel movingly portrays the burden of difference at a time when difference had no cultural value . . . Compelling.” — Los Angeles Review of Books “The mysterious circumstances of 16-year-old Lydia Lee’s tragic death have her loved ones wondering how, exactly, she spent her free time. This ghostly debut novel calls to mind The Lovely Bones .” — Marie Claire “The first chapter of Celeste Ng’s debut novel is difficult—the oldest daughter in a family is dead—but what follows is a brilliantly written, surprisingly uplifting exploration of striving in the face of alienation and of the secrets we keep from others. This could be my favorite novel of the year.” — Chris Schluep, Parade “The emotional core of Celeste Ng’s debut is what sets it apart. The different ways in which the Lee family handles Lydia’s death create internal friction, and most impressive is the way Ng handles racial politics. With a deft hand, she loads and unpacks the implications of being the only Chinese American family in a small town in Ohio.” — Kevin Nguyen, Grantland “Beautiful and poignant . . . deftly drawn . . . . It’s hard to believe that this is a debut novel for Celeste Ng. She tackles the themes of family dynamics, gender and racial stereotyping, and the weight of expectations, all with insight made more powerful through understatement. She has an exact, sophisticated touch with her prose. The sentences are straightforward. She evokes emotions through devastatingly detailed observations.” — Cleveland Plain-Dealer “Perceptive . . . a skillful and moving portrayal of a family in pain . . . It is to Ng’s credit that it is sometimes difficult for the reader to keep going; the pain and unhappiness is palpable. But it is true to the Lees, and Ng tells all.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune “Impressive . . . In its evocation of a time and place and society largely gone but hardly forgotten, Everything I Never Told You tells much that today’s reader should learn, ponder and appreciate.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch About the Author Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere . Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts , will be published in October 2022. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***Copyright © 2014 Celeste Ng one Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. As always, next to her cereal bowl, her mother has placed a sharpened pencil and Lydia’s physics homework, six problems flagged with small ticks. Driving to work, Lydia’s father nudges the dial toward WXKP, Northwest Ohio’s Best News Source, vexed by the crackles of static. On the stairs, Lydia’s brother yawns, still twined in the tail end of his dream. And in her chair in the corner of the kitchen, Lydia’s sister hunches moon-eyed over her cornflakes, sucking them to pieces one by one, waiting for Lydia to appear. It’s she who says, at last, “Lydia’s taking a long time today.” Upstairs, Marilyn opens her daughter’s door and sees the bed unslept in: neat hospital corners still pleated beneath the comforter, pillow still fluffed and convex. Nothing seems out of place. Mustard-colored corduroys tangled on the floor, a single rainbow-striped sock. A row of science fair ribbons on the wall, a postcard of Einstein. Lydia’s duffel bag crumpled on the floor of the closet. Lydia’s green bookbag slouched against her desk. Lydia’s bottle of Baby Soft atop the dresser, a sweet, powdery, loved-baby scent still in the air. But no Lydia. Marilyn closes her eyes. Maybe, when she opens them, Lydia will be there, covers pulled over her head as usual, wisps of hair trailing from beneath. A grumpy lump bundled under the bedspread that she’d somehow missed before. I was in the bathroom, Mom. I went downstairs for some water. I was lying right here all the time. Of course, when she looks, nothing has changed. The closed curtains glow like a blank television screen. Downstairs, she stops in the doorway of the kitchen, a hand on each side of the frame. Her silence says everything. “I’ll check outside,” she says at last. “Maybe for some reason—” She keeps her gaze trained on the floor as she heads for the front door, as if Lydia’s footprints might be crushed into the hall runner. Nath says to Hannah, “She was in her room last night. I heard her radio playing. At eleven thirty.” He stops, remembering that he had not said goodnight. “Can you be kidnapped if you’re sixteen?” Hannah asks. Nath prods at his bowl with a spoon. Cornflakes wilt and sink into clouded milk. Their mother steps back into the kitchen, and for one glorious fraction of a second Nath sighs with relief: there she is, Lydia, safe and sound. It happens sometimes—their faces are so alike you’d see one in the corner of your eye and mistake her for the other: the same elfish chin and high cheekbones and left-cheek dimple, the same thin-shouldered build. Only the hair color is different, Lydia’s ink-black instead of their mother’s honey-blond. He and Hannah take after their father—once a woman stopped the two of them in the grocery store and asked, “Chinese?” and when they said yes, not wanting to get into halves and wholes, she’d nodded sagely. “I knew it,” she said. “By the eyes.” She’d tugged the corner of each eye outward with a fingertip. But Lydia, defying genetics, somehow has her mother’s blue eyes, and they know this is one more reason she is their mother’s favorite. And their father’s, too. Then Lydia raises one hand to her brow and becomes his mother again. “The car’s still here,” she says, but Nath had known it would be. Lydia can’t drive; she doesn’t even have a learner’s permit yet. Last week she’d surprised them all by failing the exam, and their father wouldn’t even let her sit in the driver’s seat without it. Nath stirs his cereal, which has turned to sludge at the bottom of his bowl. The clock in the front hall ticks, then strikes seven thirty. No one moves. “Are we still going to school today?” Hannah asks. Marilyn hesitates. Then she goes to her purse and takes out her keychain with a show of efficiency. “You’ve both missed the bus. Nath, take my car and drop Hannah off on your way.” Then: “Don’t worry. We’ll find out what’s going on.” She doesn’t look at either of them. Neither looks at her. When the children have gone, she takes a mug from the cupboard, trying to keep her hands still. Long ago, when Lydia was a baby, Marilyn had once left her in the living room, playing on a quilt, and went into the kitchen for a cup of tea. She had been only eleven months old. Marilyn took the kettle off the stove and turned to find Lydia standing in the doorway. She had started and set her hand down on the hot burner. A red, spiral welt rose on her palm, and she touched it to her lips and looked at her daughter through watering eyes. Standing there, Lydia was strangely alert, as if she were taking in the kitchen for the first time. Marilyn didn’t think about missing those first steps, or how grown up her daughter had become. The thought that flashed through her mind wasn’t How did I miss it? but What else have you been hiding? Nath had pulled up and wobbled and tipped over and toddled right in front of her, but she didn’t remember Lydia even beginning to stand. Yet she seemed so steady on her bare feet, tiny fingers just peeking from the ruffled sleeve of her romper. Marilyn often had her back turned, opening the refrigerator or turning over the laundry. Lydia could have begun walking weeks ago, while she was bent over a pot, and she would not have known. She had scooped Lydia up and smoothed her hair and told her how clever she was, how proud her father would be when he came home. But she’d felt as if she’d found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle, had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off. She kissed Lydia’s cheek and pulled her close, trying to warm herself against her daughter’s small body. Now Marilyn sips tea and remembers that surprise. The high school’s number is pinned to the corkboard beside the refrigerator, and Marilyn pulls the card down and dials, twisting the cord around her finger while the phone rings. “Middlewood High,” the secretary says on the fourth ring. “This is Dottie.” She recalls Dottie: a woman built like a sofa cushion, who still wore her fading red hair in a beehive. “Good morning,” she begins, and falters. “Is my daughter in class this morning?” Dottie makes a polite cluck of impatience. “To whom am I speaking, please?” It takes her a moment to remember her own name. “Marilyn. Marilyn Lee. My daughter is Lydia Lee. Tenth grade.” “Let me look up her schedule. First period—” A pause. “Eleventh-grade physics?” “Yes, that’s right. With Mr. Kelly.” “I’ll have someone run down to that classroom and check.” There’s a thud as the secretary sets the receiver down on the desk. Marilyn studies her mug, the pool of water it has made on the counter. A few years ago, a little girl had crawled into a storage shed and suffocated. After that the police department sent a flyer to every house: If your child is missing, look for him right away. Check washing machines and clothes dryers, automobile trunks, toolsheds, any places he might have crawled to hide. Call police immediately if your child cannot be found. “Mrs. Lee?” the secretary says. “Your daughter was not in her first-period class. Are you calling to excuse her absence?” Marilyn hangs up without replying. She replaces the phone number on the board, her damp fingers smudging the ink so that the digits blur as if in a strong wind, or underwater. She checks every room, opening every closet. She peeks into the empty garage: nothing but an oil spot on the concrete and the faint, heady smell of gasoline. She’s not sure what she’s looking for: Incriminating footprints? A trail of breadcrumbs? When she was twelve, an older girl from her school had disappeared and turned up dead. Ginny Barron. She’d worn saddle shoes that Marilyn had desperately coveted. She’d gone to the store to buy cigarettes for her father, and two days later they found her body by the side of the road, halfway to Charlottesville, strangled and naked. Now Marilyn’s mind begins to churn. The summer of Son of Sam has just begun—though the papers have only recently begun to call him by that name—and even in Ohio, headlines blare the latest shooting. In a few months, the police will catch David Berkowitz, and the country will focus again on other things: the death of Elvis, the new Atari, Fonzie soaring over a shark. At this moment, though, when dark-haired New Yorkers are buying blond wigs, the world seems to Marilyn a terrifying and random place. Things like that don’t happen here, she reminds herself. Not in Middlewood, which calls itself a city but is really just a tiny college town of three thousand, where driving an hour gets you only to Toledo, where a Saturday night out means the roller rink or the bowling alley or the drive-in, where even Middlewood Lake, at the center of town, is really just a glorified pond. (She is wrong about this last one: it is a thousand feet across, and it is deep.) Still, the small of her back prickles, like beetles marching down her spine. Inside, Marilyn pulls back the shower curtain, rings screeching against rod, and stares at the white curve of the bathtub. She searches all the cabinets in the kitchen. She looks inside the pantry, the coat closet, the oven. Then she opens the refrigerator and peers inside. Olives. Milk. A pink foam package of chicken, a head of iceberg, a cluster of jade-colored grapes. She touches the cool glass of the peanut butter jar and closes the door, shaking her head. As if Lydia would somehow be inside. Morning sun fills the house, creamy as lemon chiffon, lighting the insides of cupboards and empty closets and clean, bare floors. Marilyn looks down at her hands, empty too and almost aglow in the sunlight. She lifts the phone and dials her husband’s number. For James, in his office, it is still just another Tuesday, and he clicks his pen against his teeth. A line of smudgy typing teeters slightly uphill: Serbia was one of the most powerful of the Baltic nations. He crosses out Baltic, writes Balkan, turns the page. Archduke France Ferdinand was assassinated by members of Black Ann. Franz, he thinks. Black Hand. Had these students ever opened their books? He pictures himself at the front of the lecture hall, pointer in hand, the map of Europe unfurled behind him. It’s an intro class, “America and the World Wars”; he doesn’t expect depth of knowledge or critical insight. Just a basic understanding of the facts, and one student who can spell Czechoslovakia correctly. He closes the paper and writes the score on the front page—sixty-five out of one hundred—and circles it. Every year as summer approaches, the students shuffle and rustle; sparks of resentment sizzle up like flares, then sputter out against the windowless walls of the lecture hall. Their papers grow half hearted, paragraphs trailing off, sometimes midsentence, as if the students could not hold a thought that long. Was it a waste, he wonders. All the lecture notes he’s honed, all the color slides of MacArthur and Truman and the maps of Guadalcanal. Nothing more than funny names to giggle at, the whole course just one more requirement to check off the list before they graduated. What else could he expect from this place? He stacks the paper with the others and drops the pen on top. Through the window he can see the small green quad and three kids in blue jeans tossing a Frisbee. When he was younger, still junior faculty, James was often mistaken for a student himself. That hasn’t happened in years. He’ll be forty-six next spring; he’s tenured, a few silver hairs now mixed in among the black. Sometimes, though, he’s still mistaken for other things. Once, a receptionist at the provost’s office thought he was a visiting diplomat from Japan and asked him about his flight from Tokyo. He enjoys the surprise on people’s faces when he tells them he’s a professor of American history. “Well, I am American,” he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone knocks: his teaching assistant, Louisa, with a stack of papers. “Professor Lee. I didn’t mean to bother you, but your door was open.” She sets the essays on his desk and pauses. “These weren’t very good.” “No. My half weren’t either. I was hoping you had all the As in your stack.” Louisa laughs. When he’d first seen her, in his graduate seminar last term, she’d surprised him. From the back she could have been his daughter: they had almost the same hair, hanging dark and glossy down to the shoulder blades, the same way of sitting with elbows pulled in close to the body. When she turned around, though, her face was completely her own, narrow where Lydia’s was wide, her eyes brown and steady. “Professor Lee?” she had said, holding out her hand. “I’m Louisa Chen.” Eighteen years at Middlewood College, he’d thought, and here was the first Oriental student he’d ever had. Without realizing it, he had found himself smiling. Then, a week later, she came to his office. “Is that your family?” she’d asked, tilting the photo on his desk toward her. There was a pause as she studied it. Everyone did the same thing, and that was why he kept the photo on display. He watched her eyes move from his photographic face to his wife’s, then his children’s, then back again. “Oh,” she said after a moment, and he could tell she was trying to hide her confusion. “Your wife’s—not Chinese?” It was what everyone said. But from her he had expected something different. “No,” he said, and straightened the frame so that it faced her a little more squarely, a perfect forty-five degree angle to the front of the desk. “No, she isn’t.” Still, at the end of the fall semester, he’d asked her to act as a grader for his undergraduate lecture. And in April, he’d asked her to be the teaching assistant for his summer course. “I hope the summer students will be better,” Louisa says now. “A few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.” “Well, this isn’t Harvard, that’s for sure,” James says. He pushes the two piles of essays into one and evens them, like a deck of cards, against the desktop. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s all a waste.” “You can’t blame yourself if the students don’t try. And they’re not all so bad. A few got As.” Louisa blinks at him, her eyes suddenly serious. “Your life is not a waste.” James had meant only the intro course, teaching these students who, year after year, didn’t care to learn even the basic timeline. She’s twenty-three, he thinks; she knows nothing about life, wasted or otherwise. But it’s a nice thing to hear. “Stay still,” he says. “There’s something in your hair.” Her hair is cool and a little damp, not quite dry from her morning shower. Louisa holds quite still, her eyes open and fixed on his face. It’s not a flower petal, as he’d first thought. It’s a ladybug, and as he picks it out, it tiptoes, on threadlike yellow legs, to hang upside down from his fingernail. “Damn things are everywhere this time of year,” says a voice from the doorway, and James looks up to see Stanley Hewitt leaning through. He doesn’t like Stan—a florid ham hock of a man who talks to him loudly and slowly, as if he’s hard of hearing, who makes stupid jokes that start George Washington, Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar . . . “Did you want something, Stan?” James asks. He’s acutely conscious of his hand, index finger and thumb outstretched as if pointing a popgun at Louisa’s shoulder, and pulls it back. “Just wanted to ask a question about the dean’s latest memo,” Stanley says, holding up a mimeographed sheet. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything.” “I have to get going anyway,” Louisa says. “Have a nice morning, Professor Lee. I’ll see you tomorrow. You too, Professor Hewitt.” As she slides past Stanley into the hallway, James sees that she’s blushing, and his own face grows hot. When she is gone, Stanley seats himself on the corner of James’s desk. “Good-looking girl,” he says. “She’ll be your assistant this summer too, no?” “Yes.” James unfolds his hand as the ladybug moves onto his fingertip, walking the path of his fingerprint, around and around in whorls and loops. He wants to smash his fist into the middle of Stanley’s grin, to feel Stanley’s slightly crooked front tooth slice his knuckles. Instead he smashes the ladybug with his thumb. The shell snaps between his fingers, like a popcorn hull, and the insect crumbles to sulfur-colored powder. Stanley keeps running his finger along the spines of James’s books. Later James will long for the ignorant calm of this moment, for that last second when Stan’s leer was the worst problem on his mind. But for now, when the phone rings, he is so relieved at the interruption that at first he doesn’t hear the anxiety in Marilyn’s voice. “James?” she says. “Could you come home?” The police tell them lots of teenagers leave home with no warning. Lots of times, they say, the girls are mad at their parents and the parents don’t even know. Nath watches them circulate in his sister’s room. He expects talcum powder and feather dusters, sniffing dogs, magnifying glasses. Instead the policemen just look: at the posters thumbtacked above her desk, the shoes on the floor, the half-opened bookbag. Then the younger one places his palm on the rounded pink lid of Lydia’s perfume bottle, as if cupping a child’s head in his hand. Most missing-girl cases, the older policeman tells them, resolve themselves within twenty-four hours. The girls come home by themselves. “What does that mean?” Nath says. “ Most? What does that mean?” Read more

Wild Riders

Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)

Amazon.com Review "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex , the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides , remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory. Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor: Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret."  I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons From Publishers Weekly As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: "Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' " The "me" of that sentence, "Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think of her "crocus" as simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14. Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary sensitivity to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and Cal's gender confusion is blended with the story of her first love, Milton's growing political resentments and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender. This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal to a large, general audience. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal Adult/High School-From the opening paragraph, in which the narrator explains that he was "born twice," first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974, readers are aware that Calliope Stephanides is a hermaphrodite. To explain his situation, Cal starts in 1922, when his grandparents came to America. In his role as the "prefetal narrator," he tells the love story of this couple, who are brother and sister; his parents are blood relatives as well. Then he tells his own story, which is that of a female child growing up in suburban Detroit with typical adolescent concerns. Callie, as he is known then, worries because she hasn't developed breasts or started menstruating; her facial hair is blamed on her ethnicity, and she and her mother go to get waxed together. She develops a passionate crush on her best girlfriend, "the Object," and consummates it in a manner both detached and steamy. Then an accident causes Callie to find out what she's been suspecting-she's not actually a girl. The story questions what it is that makes us who we are and concludes that one's inner essence stays the same, even in light of drastic outer changes. Mostly, the novel remains a universal narrative of a girl who's happy to grow up but hates having to leave her old self behind. Readers will love watching the narrator go from Callie to Cal, and witnessing all of the life experiences that get her there. Jamie Watson, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Eugenides's second novel (after The Virgin Suicides) opens "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl...in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy...in August of 1974." Thus starts the epic tale of how Calliope Stephanides is transformed into Cal. Spanning three generations and two continents, the story winds from the small Greek village of Smyrna to the smoggy, crime-riddled streets of Detroit, past historical events, and through family secrets. The author's eloquent writing captures the essence of Cal, a hermaphrodite, who sets out to discover himself by tracing the story of his family back to his grandparents. From the beginning, the reader is brought into a world rich in culture and history, as Eugenides extends his plot into forbidden territories with unique grace. His confidence in the story, combined with his sure prose, helps readers overcome their initial surprise and focus on the emotional revelation of the characters and beyond. Once again, Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly recommended. - - Rachel Collins, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist In his second novel, the author of The Virgin Suicides (1993) once again proves himself to be a wildly imaginative writer, this time penning a coming-of-age tale, ranging from the 1920s in Asia Minor to the present in Berlin, about a hermaphrodite. Perhaps what is most surprising about Eugenides' offbeat but engrossing book is how he establishes, seemingly effortlessly, the credibility of his narrator: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan." So starts Cal's remarkably detailed odyssey, which began when his grandparents, who were siblings, married and vowed to keep the true nature of their relationship a secret; however, their deception comes back to haunt them in the form of their grandchild. With a sure yet light-handed touch, Eugenides skillfully bends our notions of gender as we realize, along with Cal, that although he has been raised as a girl, he is more comfortable as a boy. Although at times the novel reads like a medical text, it is also likely to hold readers in thrall with its affecting characterization of a brave and lonely soul and its vivid depiction of exactly what it means to be both male and female. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review “Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator. . . A deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century.” ― The New York Times “Expansive and radiantly generous. . . Deliriously American.” ― The New York Times Book Review (cover review) “A towering achievement. . . . [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being.” ― Los Angeles Times Book Review (cover review) “A big, cheeky, splendid novel. . . it goes places few narrators would dare to tread. . . lyrical and fine.” ― The Boston Globe “An epic. . . This feast of a novel is thrilling in the scope of its imagination and surprising in its tenderness.” ― People “Unprecedented, astounding. . . . The most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak.” ― San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite in the way that Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel is about a teenage boy. . . A novel of chance, family, sex, surgery, and America, it contains multitudes.” ― Men's Journal “Wildly imaginative. . . frequently hilarious and touching.” ― USA Today About the Author Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides , was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. His collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint, is from FSG (2017). Eugenides is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Middlesex By Jeffrey Eugenides Picador USA Copyright ©2007 Jeffrey EugenidesAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780312427733 Chapter One THE SILVER SPOON * * * I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroitday in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, inan emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce'sstudy, "Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,"published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Ormaybe you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the nowsadly outdated Genetics and Heredity . That's me on page 578, standingnaked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes. My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides.My most recent driver's license (from the Federal Republic of Germany)records my first name simply as Cal. I'm a former field hockeygoalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation,rare attendant at the Greek Orthodox mass, and, for most of myadult life, an employee of the U.S. State Department. Like Tiresias, Iwas first one thing and then the other. I've been ridiculed by classmates,guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researchedby the March of Dimes. A redheaded girl from GrossePointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her brotherliked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimmingpool turned me into myth; I've left my body in order to occupyothers-and all this happened before I turned sixteen. But now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on.After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great-auntsand -uncles, long-lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or,in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those things in one. Andso before it's too late I want to get it down for good: this roller-coasterride of a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of therecessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomedtwo and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, whilethe goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed downthrough nine generations, gathering invisibly within the pollutedpool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence, in theguise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seedacross the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrialrains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother's own mid-westernwomb. Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic, too. Three months before I was born, in the aftermath of one of our elaborateSunday dinners, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides orderedmy brother to get her silkworm box. Chapter Eleven had beenheading toward the kitchen for a second helping of rice puddingwhen she blocked his way. At fifty-seven, with her short, squat figureand intimidating hairnet, my grandmother was perfectly designed forblocking people's paths. Behind her in the kitchen, the day's large femalecontingent had congregated, laughing and whispering. Intrigued,Chapter Eleven leaned sideways to see what was going on,but Desdemona reached out and firmly, hegemonically even, pinchedhis cheek. Having regained his attention, she sketched a rectangle inthe air and pointed at the ceiling. Then, through her ill-fitting dentures,she said, "Go for yia yia , dolly mou ." Chapter Eleven knew what to do. He ran across the hall into theliving room. On all fours he scrambled up the formal staircase to thesecond floor. He raced past the bedrooms along the upstairs corridor.At the far end was a nearly invisible door, wallpapered over like theentrance to a secret passageway. Chapter Eleven located the tinydoorknob level with his head and, using all his strength, pulled itopen. Another set of stairs lay behind it. For a long moment mybrother stared hesitantly into the darkness above, before climbing,very slowly now, up to the attic where my grandparents lived. In sneakers he passed beneath the twelve, damply newspaperedbirdcages suspended from the rafters. With a brave face he immersedhimself in the sour odor of the parakeets, and in my grandparents'own particular aroma, a mixture of mothballs and hashish. He negotiatedhis way past my grandfather's book-piled desk and his collectionof rebetika records. Finally, bumping into the leather ottomanand the circular coffee table made of brass, he found my grandparents'bed and, under it, the silkworm box. Carved from olivewood, a little bigger than a shoe box, it had atin lid perforated by tiny airholes and inset with the icon of an unrecognizablesaint. The saint's face had been rubbed off, but the fingersof his right hand were raised to bless a short, purple, terrifically self-confident-lookingmulberry tree. After gazing awhile at this vividbotanical presence, Chapter Eleven pulled the box from under thebed and opened it. Inside were the two wedding crowns made fromrope and, coiled like snakes, the two long braids of hair, each tiedwith a crumbling black ribbon. He poked one of the braids with hisindex finger. Just then a parakeet squawked, making my brotherjump, and he closed the box, tucked it under his arm, and carried itdownstairs to Desdemona. She was still waiting in the doorway. Taking the silkworm box outof his hands, she turned back into the kitchen. At this point ChapterEleven was granted a view of the room, where all the women nowfell silent. They moved aside to let Desdemona pass and there, in themiddle of the linoleum, was my mother. Tessie Stephanides was leaningback in a kitchen chair, pinned beneath the immense, drum-tightglobe of her pregnant belly. She had a happy, helpless expression onher face, which was flushed and hot. Desdemona set the silkwormbox on the kitchen table and opened the lid. She reached under thewedding crowns and the hair braids to come up with somethingChapter Eleven hadn't seen: a silver spoon. She tied a piece of stringto the spoon's handle. Then, stooping forward, she dangled thespoon over my mother's swollen belly. And, by extension, over me. Up until now Desdemona had had a perfect record: twenty-threecorrect guesses. She'd known that Tessie was going to be Tessie.She'd predicted the sex of my brother and my four classically namedcousins, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Cleopatra. The only childrenwhose genders she hadn't divined were her own, because it was badluck for a mother to plumb the mysteries of her own womb. Fearlessly,however, she plumbed my mother's. After some initial hesitation,the spoon swung north to south, which meant that I was goingto be a boy. Splay-legged in the chair, my mother tried to smile. She didn'twant a boy. She had one already. In fact, she was so certain I was goingto be a girl that she'd picked out only one name for me: Calliope.But when my grandmother shouted in Greek, "A boy!" the cry wentaround the room, and out into the hall, and across the hall into theliving room where the men were arguing politics. And my mother,hearing it repeated so many times, began to believe it might be true. As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched intothe kitchen to tell his mother that, this time at least, her spoon waswrong. "And how you know so much?" Desdemona asked him. Towhich he replied what many Americans of his generation wouldhave: "It's science, Ma." Ever since they had decided to have another child-the diner was doingwell and Chapter Eleven was long out of diapers-Milton andTessie had been in agreement that they wanted a daughter. ChapterEleven had just turned five years old. He'd recently found a dead birdin the yard, bringing it into the house to show his mother. He likedshooting things, hammering things, smashing things, and wrestlingwith his father. In such a masculine household, Tessie had begun tofeel like the odd woman out and saw herself in ten years' time imprisonedin a world of hubcaps and hernias. My mother pictured adaughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconderof proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In the spring of 1959, whendiscussions of my fertilization got under way, my mother couldn'tenvision that women would soon be burning their brassieres by thethousand. Hers were padded, stiff, fire-retardant. As much as Tessieloved her son, she knew there were certain things she'd be able toshare only with a daughter. On his morning drive to work, my father had been seeing visionsof a irresistibly sweet, dark-eyed little girl. She sat on the seat besidehim-mostly during stoplights-directing questions at his patient,all-knowing ear. "What do you call that thing, Daddy?" "That? That'sthe Cadillac seal." "What's the Cadillac seal?" "Well, a long time ago,there was a French explorer named Cadillac, and he was the one whodiscovered Detroit. And that seal was his family seal, from France.""What's France?" "France is a country in Europe." "What's Europe?""It's a continent, which is like a great big piece of land, way, way biggerthan a country. But Cadillacs don't come from Europe anymore, kukla . They come from right here in the good old U.S.A." The lightturned green and he drove on. But my prototype lingered. She wasthere at the next light and the next. So pleasant was her company thatmy father, a man loaded with initiative, decided to see what he coulddo to turn his vision into reality. Thus: for some time now, in the living room where the men discussedpolitics, they had also been discussing the velocity of sperm.Peter Tatakis, "Uncle Pete," as we called him, was a leading memberof the debating society that formed every week on our black loveseats. A lifelong bachelor, he had no family in America and so had becomeattached to ours. Every Sunday he arrived in his wine-darkBuick, a tall, prune-faced, sad-seeming man with an incongruouslyvital head of wavy hair. He was not interested in children. A proponentof the Great Books series-which he had read twice-UnclePete was engaged with serious thought and Italian opera. He had apassion, in history, for Edward Gibbon, and, in literature, for thejournals of Madame de Stakl. He liked to quote that witty lady'sopinion on the German language, which held that German wasn'tgood for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentencefor the verb, and so couldn't interrupt. Uncle Pete had wantedto become a doctor, but the "catastrophe" had ended that dream. Inthe United States, he'd put himself through two years of chiropracticschool, and now ran a small office in Birmingham with a humanskeleton he was still paying for in installments. In those days, chiropractorshad a somewhat dubious reputation. People didn't come toUncle Pete to free up their kundalini. He cracked necks, straightenedspines, and made custom arch supports out of foam rubber. Still, hewas the closest thing to a doctor we had in the house on those Sundayafternoons. As a young man he'd had half his stomach surgicallyremoved, and now after dinner always drank a Pepsi-Cola to help digesthis meal. The soft drink had been named for the digestive enzymepepsin, he sagely told us, and so was suited to the task. It was this kind of knowledge that led my father to trust what UnclePete said when it came to the reproductive timetable. His head ona throw pillow, his shoes off, Madama Butterfly softly playing on myparents' stereo, Uncle Pete explained that, under the microscope,sperm carrying male chromosomes had been observed to swim fasterthan those carrying female chromosomes. This assertion generatedimmediate merriment among the restaurant owners and fur finishersassembled in our living room. My father, however, adopted the poseof his favorite piece of sculpture, The Thinker , a miniature of whichsat across the room on the telephone table. Though the topic hadbeen brought up in the open-forum atmosphere of those postprandialSundays, it was clear that, notwithstanding the impersonal toneof the discussion, the sperm they were talking about was my father's.Uncle Pete made it clear: to have a girl baby, a couple should "havesexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation." That way, theswift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggishbut more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped. My father had trouble persuading my mother to go along with thescheme. Tessie Zizmo had been a virgin when she married MiltonStephanides at the age of twenty-two. Their engagement, which coincidedwith the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. Mymother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindleand snuff my father's flame, keeping him at a low burn for the durationof a global cataclysm. This hadn't been all that difficult,however, since she was in Detroit and Milton was in Annapolis at theU.S. Naval Academy. For more than a year Tessie lit candles at theGreek church for her fianci, while Milton gazed at her photographspinned over his bunk. He liked to pose Tessie in the manner of themovie magazines, standing sideways, one high heel raised on a step,an expanse of black stocking visible. My mother looks surprisinglypliable in those old snapshots, as though she liked nothing betterthan to have her man in uniform arrange her against the porches andlampposts of their humble neighborhood. She didn't surrender until after Japan had. Then, from their weddingnight onward (according to what my brother told my coveredears), my parents made love regularly and enjoyably. When it came tohaving children, however, my mother had her own ideas. It was herbelief that an embryo could sense the amount of love with which ithad been created. For this reason, my father's suggestion didn't sitwell with her. "What do you think this is, Milt, the Olympics?" "We were just speaking theoretically," said my father. "What does Uncle Pete know about having babies?" "He read this particular article in Scientific American ," Milton said.And to bolster his case: "He's a subscriber." "Listen, if my back went out, I'd go to Uncle Pete. If I had flatfeet like you do, I'd go. But that's it." "This has all been verified. Under the microscope. The malesperms are faster." "I bet they're stupider, too." "Go on. Malign the male sperms all you want. Feel free. We don'twant a male sperm. What we want is a good old, slow, reliable femalesperm." "Even if it's true, it's still ridiculous. I can't just do it like clockwork,Milt." "It'll be harder on me than you." "I don't want to hear it." "I thought you wanted a daughter." "I do." "Well," said my father, "this is how we can get one." Tessie laughed the suggestion off. But behind her sarcasm was aserious moral reservation. Continues... Excerpted from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Copyright ©2007 by Jeffrey Eugenides. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Monster

Review "Myers grapples with complex moral questions that will definitely make readers stop and think. -- Booklist, Editors' Choice 1999 From the Back Cover FADE IN: INTERIOR: Early morning in CELL BLOCK D, MANHATTAN DETENTION CENTER. Steve (Voice-Over)Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady prosecutor called me ... Monster . About the Author Walter Dean Myers is an award-winning writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for young people. He has received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for his contribution to young adult literature and is a five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. His many titles include Bad Boy: A Memoir; Monster, the 2000 Michael L. Printz Award winner and National Book Award Finalist; and Malcolm X: A Fire Burning Brightly, illustrated by Leonard Jenkins. Walter Dean Myers lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.In His Own Words... I am a product of Harlem and of the values, color, toughness and caring that I found there as a child.I learned my flat jump shot in the church basement and got my first kiss during recess at Bible school.I played the endless street games kids played in the pre-television days and paid enough attention to candy and junk food to dutifully alarm my mother. From my foster parents, the Deans, I received the love that was ultimately to strengthen me, even when I had forgotten its source.It was my foster mother, a half Indian-half German woman, who taught me to read, though she herself was barely literate. I had a speech difficulty but didn't view it as anything special.It wasn't necessary for me to be much of a social creature once I discovered books.Books took me, not so much to foreign lands and fanciful adventures, but to a place within myself that I have been constantly exploring ever since. The George Bruce Branch of the public Library was my most treasured place.I couldn't believe my luck in discovering what I enjoyed most -- reading -- was free.And I was tough enough to carry the books home through the streets without too many incidents. At sixteen it seemed a good idea to leave school, and so I did.On my seventeenth birthday I joined the army.After the army there were jobs -- some good, some bad, few worth mentioning.Leaving school seemed less like a good idea. Writing for me has been many things.It was a way to overcome the hindrance of speech problems as I tried to reach out to the world.It was a way of establishing my humanity in a world that often ignores the humanity of those in less favored positions.It was a way to make a few extra dollars when they were badly needed. What I want to do with the writing keeps changing, too.Perhaps I just get clearer in what it is I am doing.I'm sure that after I'm dead someone will lay it all out nicely.I'd hate to see what kind of biography my cat, Askia, would write about me.Probably something like "Walter Dean Myers had enormous feet, didn't feed me on time, and often sat in my favorite chair."At any rate, what I think I'm doing now is rediscovering the innocence of children that I once took for granted.I cannot relive it or reclaim it, but I can expose it and celebrate it in the books I write.I really like people -- I mean I really like people -- and children are some of the best people I know. I've always felt it a little pretentious to write about yourself, but it's not too bad if you don't write too much. -- Walter Dean Myers Read more

Did You Ever Have a Family

Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of September 2015: Bill Clegg’s fiction debut looks at the aftereffects of a tragedy, skillfully employing alternating chapters told by a handful of characters. The night before her daughter’s wedding, June Reid loses her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend in a house fire. It is a nearly unimaginable event, one that sends June running cross-country from her small community in Connecticut to settle in the even smaller community of Moclips, Washington. Sadness trails June, but so does a web of support that forms between members of the community she left behind, as well as the one that she has settled in. What really happened that night in Connecticut? Eventually, we find out. More importantly, we find out the meaning of the title. It is both a lament and a celebration. --Chris Schluep Guest Interview Jenny Offill in conversation with Bill Clegg 1. The novel is paced almost like a thriller, with the pieces of the mystery coming slowly into place. Does plot come first for you when you begin a book or are you more likely to start from an image or a voice? In this case it started with the first three lines of the second chapter: She will go. For a long time the only thing I knew about the book was that a woman named June was driving away from a small town, heavy with grief and guilt and unable to stay a minute longer. Everything after those words was an unraveling of that mystery— Who is she? What is driving her away? What happened? What is the source of her grief? What do the people in the town have to say about her? 2. You worked on the novel for many years. Do you remember how the first spark of it came to you? The initial impulse came from wanting to write about where I’m from. I grew up in a small town two hours from Manhattan and there was a regular gust of moneyed weekend and summer residents that created both a great opportunity to imagine outside of one’s life into other possibilities, but it also caused a fair bit of resentment and tension. I wanted to write about the particular experience of such a town, and so the early writing centered on that. 3. I'm so impressed by the way you carry off many different yet distinct points of view throughout your novel. It really comes together wonderfully in the end. Did you have any models for this kind of expansive narrative? Did you start out to tell the story in that manner or was it something that evolved over time? Though I didn’t consciously follow any model, Jean Stein’s Edie no doubt had a strong influence as well as David Huddle’s novel The Story of a Million Years . Both books get to the heart of their stories by circling them with other voices and perspectives. 4. In many ways, Did You Ever Have a Family seems like an extended meditation on grief and forgiveness. Were your previous memoirs regarding addiction and recovery a springboard into these themes? Surely, they are, though not deliberately. In my recovery I have experienced how powerful and surprising being forgiven can be. I caused a lot of wreckage before I got sober, so if certain people were going to remain in my life I knew that I would need their forgiveness. But what I didn’t expect or count on was that in being forgiven, I would learn how to forgive the people I believed had failed or harmed me. The most powerful example of this in my life is with my father. Decades-long resentments and hurt fell away when I could finally see him as a man who did his best and fell short, and him falling short was not the full measure of his character but only a piece in a longer and more complicated story. Letting all that go and allowing myself a relationship with him in his last ten years was a miracle given how estranged we’d been, and it is one of the things recovery gave me. In the novel there are a lot of people holding on to anger and guilt and they are lonely, which is something I identify with. Part of what I’m exploring in the book is how forgiveness—granting as well as receiving—can be a beginning to an end of that isolation. 5. What book or poem first made you want to be a writer? Reading Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting was probably the first time where it occurred to me that someone actually came up with an idea and wrote it. And I believe it’s the first time I thought, Damn, I wish I’d thought of that. 6. What novels have you read more than once? I read your novel Dept. of Speculation twice! I read it when it first came out and then, when we decided to talk a few weeks ago, I picked it up again and could not put it down. Crikey, is it good. As nimble and witty as the writing is and as streaking as it is with literary and historical references and anecdotes, it also has this spellbinding effect that only the truth of something can produce. And the truth you are conveying is about marriage and how people happen in them. Reading your novel is a kind of thrill ride but it was also a great relief. But mainly I go back to the same small pile. Besides W. S. Merwin’s The Vixen, The Carrier of Ladders , and The Lice (which are poetry collections, not novels), I go back to Jude the Obscure and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair every now and again. Jude the Obscure because it’s such an audacious story and I find something surprising each time, and Gibbon’s trilogy because I read it during a time that shaped me—an optimistic and curious stretch in my junior year in college—and if I feel stuck or limited its peculiar music has the effect of making things seem more possible. I also have reread a lot of Deborah Eisenberg’s short stories. Under the 82nd Airborne is one of the best collections of short stories ever. I remember reading it in my twenties in New York and being excited that she lived in Manhattan and was, somewhere in the city, alive and thinking. Before that I mostly read books by long-dead authors so the idea that I could sit next to her on the subway or a restaurant was mind-blowing. I did sit next to her at a play not long ago and I couldn’t stop staring. 7. Has anything surprised you about the process of publication from the writer's side, and if so, what? I didn’t count on finding the conversation about something I’d written to be so much, um, fun. With the memoirs, the engagement with readers has been meaningful and, given the main subject matters of addiction and recovery, pretty heavy. But with the novel the exchanges so far have had a giddy pleasure on the level of gossiping about people you went to high school with. It still shocks me that anyone would know and have an opinion about the characters in Did You Ever Have a Family . They existed for so long as just a daydream that to have them named and commented on is startling, but in the best way. Talking about them is a kind of reunion. Review PRAISE FOR DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY “Masterly…The vignettes provide deft reprieves, a mosaic of a community and its connection to the tragedy. And connection—the way people and their lives fuse—is this novel’s main concern." ― The New York Times Book Review “A brilliantly constructed debut set in the aftermath of catastrophic loss.” -- 2015 Man Booker Prize Judges (Longlist Finalist)"An attempt to map how the unbearable is borne, elegantly written and bravely imagined." ― Kirkus Reviews, starred review “A propulsive but tightly crafted narrative… reveal[s] the fine-grained sorrows of the human condition, rendered in polished, quietly captivating prose. As the stories emerge, so do their connections—and the idea of connection itself…. Readers may come to this debut novel because of agent/memoirist Clegg’s reputation, but they’ll stay for the stellar language and storytelling. Highly recommended.” ― Library Journal, starred review “In this sorrowful and deeply probing debut novel, literary agent and memoirist Clegg ( Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man ) delivers a story of loss and its grueling aftermath . . . it's Clegg's deft handling of all the parsed details—missed opportunities, harbored regrets, and unspoken good intentions—that make the journey toward redemption and forgiveness so memorable.” ― Publishers Weekly, starred review "Clegg is both delicately lyrical and emotionally direct in this masterful novel, which strives to show how people make bearable what is unbearable, offering consolation in small but meaningful gestures. Both ineffably sad and deeply inspiring, this mesmerizing novel makes for a powerful debut." ― Booklist, starred review "I marveled my way through Did You Ever Have a Family, at not just the masterful writing and storytelling, but at the emotional authenticities of every persuasion. It's a wondrous thing when a writer gets things this right, this absorbing, and this beautiful. Bravo, Bill Clegg, and thank you." -- Bestselling author Elinor Lipman"Full of small-town secrets and whispers, Bill Clegg has woven a richly textured tale of loss and healing. This is a deeply optimistic book about the power of human sympathy to pull us from the wreckage of our fate." -- Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright"The force, range, and scope of Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family will grab you with its opening lines, and won’t let go until its final one. I can’t recall another novel that so effortlessly weds a nuanced, lyrical voice to an unflinching vision of just how badly things can go for people. I read it deep into the night, all the way through, telling myself it was getting late, I could finish the book in the morning. I finished it that night, however, slept a few hours, and then, in the morning, started reading it again." -- Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham"Like the question it poses, Did You Ever Have a Family is brutally direct yet it's got an enormous symbolic power. You hold in your hands a great book of kindness—every restrained, exquisite sentence comes loaded for bear. It's been a lot of years since a novel has so moved me. Number Bill Clegg among that endangered species: major American writer." -- National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author Darin Strauss“One of the year's most hotly anticipated books.” ― Shelf Awareness "The sharp writing and haunting characters had me glued.” ― Glamour, "Five Things I’m Loving" “[An] unexpectedly tender fiction debut.” ― Vogue “Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family limns the far reaches of grief.” ― Vanity Fair “[An] incisive first novel." ― Harper’s Bazaar "Clegg is a gimlet-eyed observer and is masterly at deftly sucking in the reader as he fashions an emotional tsunami into a profound, mesmerizing description." ― The Sunday Times (UK) “Clegg has produced a moving, clever novel that subtly dissects the relationships between mothers and their children, lovers, neighbors and strangers. Did You Ever Have a Family is an unpretentious work about how a life can be salvaged from the ashes. Bill Clegg is an author to watch.” ― The Times (UK) "A quiet novel of devastating power. Clegg has drawn a tale of prodigious tenderness and lyricism.... that reveals the depths of the human heart. [ Did You Ever Have a Family ] is a wonderful and deeply moving novel, which compels us to look directly into the dark night of our deepest fears and then quietly, step by tiny step, guides us towards the first pink smudges of the dawn." ― The Guardian (UK) “A quiet, measured and engrossing piece…. a poignant portrait of fractured family lives. Clegg’s prose conveys the numbed grieving state of mind, its quietness fitting its subject of deep clear-eyed sadness…. It approaches grief gently and, in the end, its gentleness is its triumph.” ― The Daily Telegraph (UK) “This first novel arrives with a shout…Clegg covers the full spectrum of human emotion in this beautifully nuanced story." ― BBC, “Ten Books to Read in September” “In trying to tell the faceted story of a single moment as seen by a hundred different eyes, Clegg has attempted something daring. And the wonder of it is how often his experiment succeeds...” ― NPR “In measured prose, Clegg unspools the stories of June and the other survivors as they face unimaginable horror and take their first halting steps toward hope and community." ― People One of Nineteen Awesome New Books You Need to Read This Fall (2015) ― Buzzfeed " Did You Ever Have a Family is the first full-length foray into fiction for Bill Clegg... but it reads like the quietly assured work of a veteran novelist.... it’s rare to find a book that renders unimaginable loss in such an eloquent, elegant voice." ― Entertainment Weekly, A- review “Illuminate[s] how grief, guilt, regrets and the deep need for human connection are woven into the very flammable fabric of humanity…. Clegg's emotionally direct, polished novel is at once heartrending and heartening. It's a gift to be able to write about such dark stuff without succumbing to utter bleakness, and to infuse even scorching sadness with a ray of hopefulness.” ― Los Angeles Times “How do you continue if all at once, everyone you love has been wiped away? With crosscutting perspectives and a voluminous cast of characters, Clegg constructs a layered narrative with some dexterous plot twists.” ― Boston Globe "This isn’t your typical mystery, it’s something better: a real-life thriller in which resolution takes the form of acceptance. While [Clegg] never suggests anything as simplistic as closure for these tormented souls, he manages to find ways for them to move forward from this tragedy, making it seem a little less random than it did at the beginning, and that in and of itself is a kind of mercy." ― San Francisco Gate "[ Did You Ever Have a ] Family is a quiet and beautifully written novel that will keep readers turning the pages…. There is no resignation here. Rather, Clegg seems to say, it is the courage to intervene in another’s life that defines the notion of family.” ― Star Tribune “Heartbreaking but quietly optimistic, Did You Ever Have a Family is a rumination on horrific loss, healing, forgiveness, and the families we choose for ourselves.” ― Buzzfeed, “19 Awesome New Books You Need To Read This Fall” (2015) “ [ Did You Ever Have A ] Family melds several grieving voices into a detailed mosaic of a town split between locals and weekenders, a mystery in which the stakes really matter, and a recovery story more original than Clegg’s own.” ― Vulture, “7 Books You Need to Read This September” (2015) About the Author Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days . The author of the novels Did You Ever Have a Family and The End of the Day , he has written for the New York Times , Lapham’s Quarterly , New York magazine, The Guardian , and Harper’s Bazaar . Read more

Looking for Mr. Goodbar

About the Author Judith Rossner [1935–2005] was an American novelist, most famous for the bestseller, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975). A lifelong New Yorker, her books centered around the themes of urban alienation and gender relations.

What Alice Forgot

Review Praise for What Alice Forgot “Funny and knowing...[about] what we choose to remember, and fight to forget.” — O Magazine “The gripping story of a woman who wakes up with a bump on her head and no knowledge of the past ten years...an acutely observed romantic comedy that is both thought-provoking and funny.” — Marie Claire (UK) “The affecting tale of Alice’s chance for a ten-year do-over.” — The New York Times “Grabbed me on the first page…a deep and wondrous novel.” — New York Times bestselling author Luanne Rice “I loved this book. It has, for me, everything that makes a good novel excellent.” — New York Times bestselling author Jeanne Ray “Heartfelt, witty, and thought-provoking...a story you’ll remember.” — New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Crusie “Highly addictive.” — She Magazine (UK; Book of the Month) “I loved this original read.” — The Sun (UK) “Funny and captivating.” — Closer (UK) “Winning...well-paced, and thoroughly pleasurable.” — Publishers Weekly “An often funny, sometimes heartrending, deeply personal portrait of a woman attempting to unravel her own mystery.” — Booklist “Moriarity makes this more than just a one-note story, weaving in a plotline involving Alice's childless sister...intriguing...will keep readers guessing and curious to know more about Alice.” — Library Journal About the Author Liane Moriarty is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Nine Perfect Strangers , Three Wishes , Truly Madly Guilty , Big Little Lies , The Husband’s Secret , The Hypnotist’s Love Story , and What Alice Forgot . She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 She was floating, arms outspread, water lapping her body, breathing in a summery fragrance of salt and coconut. There was a pleasantly satisfied breakfast taste in her mouth of bacon and coffee and possibly croissants. She lifted her chin and the morning sun shone so brightly on the water, she had to squint through spangles of light to see her feet in front of her. Her toenails were each painted a different color. Red. Gold. Purple. Funny. The nail polish hadn’t been applied very well. Blobby and messy. Someone else was floating in the water right next to her. Someone she liked a lot, who made her laugh, with toenails painted the same way. The other person waggled multicolored toes at her companionably, and she was filled with sleepy contentment. Somewhere in the distance, a man’s voice shouted, “Marco?” and a chorus of children’s voices cried back, “Polo!” The man called out again, “Marco, Marco, Marco?” and the voices answered, “Polo, Polo, Polo!” A child laughed; a long, gurgling giggle, like a stream of soap bubbles. A voice said quietly and insistently in her ear, “Alice?” and she tipped back her head and let the cool water slide silently over her face.Tiny dots of light danced before her eyes.Was it a dream or a memory?“I don’t know!” said a frightened voice. “I didn’t see it happen!”No need to get your knickers in a knot.The dream or memory or whatever it was dissolved and vanished like a reflection on water, and instead fragments of thought began to drift through her head, as if she were waking up from a long, deep sleep, late on a Sunday morning.Is cream cheese considered a soft cheese?It’s not a hard cheese.It’s not . . .. . . hard at all.So, logically, you would think . . .. . . something.Something logical.Lavender is lovely.Logically lovely.Must prune back the lavender!I can smell lavender.No, I can’t.Yes, I can.That’s when she noticed the pain in her head for the first time. It hurt on one side, a lot, as if someone had given her a good solid thwack with a baseball bat.Her thoughts sharpened. What was this pain in the head all about? Nobody had warned her about pain in her head. She had a whole list of peculiar symptoms to be prepared for: heartburn, a taste like aluminum foil in your mouth, dizziness, extreme tiredness—but nothing about a hammering ache at the side of your head. That one should really have been mentioned, because it was very painful. Of course, if she couldn’t handle a run-of-the mill headache, well then . . .The scent of lavender seemed to be coming and going, like a gentle breeze.She let herself drift again.The best thing would be to fall back asleep and return to that lovely dream with the water and the multicolored toenails.Actually, maybe someone had mentioned headaches and she forgot? Yes, they had! Headaches, for heaven’s sake! Really bad ones. Fabulous.So much to remember. No soft cheeses or smoked salmon or sushi because of the risk of that disease she never even knew existed. Listeria. Something to do with bacteria. Hurts the baby. That’s why you weren’t allowed to eat leftovers. One bite of a leftover chicken drumstick could kill the baby. The brutal responsibilities of parenthood.For now, she would just go back to sleep. That was the best thing.Listeria.Wisteria.The wisteria over the side fence is going to look stunning if it ever gets around to flowering.Listeria, wisteria.Ha. Funny words.She smiled, but her head really did hurt a lot. She was trying to be brave.“Alice? Can you hear me?”The lavender smell got stronger again. A bit sickly sweet.Cream cheese is a spreadable cheese. Not too soft, not too hard, just right. Like the baby bear’s bed.“Her eyelids are fluttering. Like she’s dreaming.”It was no use. She couldn’t get back to sleep, even though she felt exhausted, as if she could sleep forever. Were all pregnant women walking around with aching heads like this? Was the idea to toughen them up for labor pains? When she got up, she would check it out in one of the baby books.She always forgot how pain was so upsetting. Cruel. It hurt your feelings. You just wanted it to stop, please, right now. Epidurals were the way to go. One epidural for my headache, please. Thank you.“Alice, try and open your eyes.”Was cream cheese even cheese? You didn’t put a dollop of cream cheese on a cheese platter. Maybe cheese didn’t actually mean cheese in the context of cream cheese. She wouldn’t ask the doctor about it, just in case it’s an embarrassing “Oh, Alice” mistake.She couldn’t get comfortable. The mattress felt like cold concrete. If she wriggled over, she could nudge Nick with her foot until he sleepily rolled over and pulled her to him in a big warm bear hug. Her human hot water bottle.Where was Nick? Had he already got up? Maybe he was making her a cup of tea.“Don’t try and move, Alice. Just stay still and open your eyes, sweetie.”Elisabeth would know about the cream cheese. She’d snort in her bigsisterly way and be precise. Mum wouldn’t have a clue. She’d be stricken. She’d say, “Oh dear, oh no! I’m sure I ate soft cheeses when I was pregnant with you girls! They didn’t know about that sort of thing back then.” She’d talk on and on and worry that Alice had accidentally broken a rule. Mum believed in rules. So did Alice actually.Frannie wouldn’t know but she’d research it, proudly, using her new computer, in the same way that she used to help Alice and Elisabeth find information for school projects in her Encyclopedia Britannica.Her head really did hurt.Presumably this was only the squidgiest fraction of how much labor would hurt. So that was just great.It was not as if she’d actually eaten any cream cheese that she could remember.“Alice? Alice!”She didn’t even really like cream cheese.“Has someone called an ambulance?”There was that smell of lavender again.Once, when they were undoing their seat belts, Nick said (in answer to some fishing-for-compliments thing she’d just said), “Don’t be ridiculous, you goose, you know I’m bloody besotted with you.”She opened the car door and felt sunshine on her legs and smelled the lavender she’d planted by the front door.Bloody besotted.It was a moment of lavender-scented bliss, after grocery shopping.“It’s coming. I called triple zero! That’s the first time in my life I’ve ever called triple zero! I felt all self-conscious. I nearly called 911 like an American. I actually punched in the nine. There’s proof I watch too much television.”“I hope it’s not, like, serious. I mean, I couldn’t, like, get sued or anything, could I?”Was that talkback radio she could hear? She hated talkback radio. The callers were always appalled by something. Alice said once that she’d never been appalled by anything. Elisabeth said that was appalling.“Alice, can you hear me? Can you hear me, Alice?”Sultana, can you hear me? Can you hear me, Sultana?Every night, before they went to sleep, Nick talked to the baby through an empty toilet roll pressed to Alice’s stomach. He’d heard this idea on some radio show. They said that way the baby would learn to recognize the father’s voice as well as the mother’s.“Ahoy!” he’d call. “Can you hear me, Sultana? This is your father speaking!” They’d read that the baby was the size of a sultana by now. So that’s what they called it. Only in private, of course; they were cool parents-to-be. No sappiness in public.The Sultana said it was fine, thanks, Dad, bit bored at times, but doing okay. Apparently he wished his mum would stop eating all that boring green shit and have a pizza for a change. “Enough with the rabbit food!” he demanded.It seemed the Sultana was most likely to be a boy. He just seemed to have a masculine personality. The little rogue. They both agreed on this.Alice would lie back and look at the top of Nick’s head. There were a few shiny silvery strands. She didn’t know if he knew about them, so she didn’t mention them. He was thirty-two. The silver strands made her eyes blur. All those wacky pregnancy hormones.Alice never talked out loud to the baby. She spoke to it in her mind, shyly, when she was in the bath (not too hot—so many rules). “Hey there, Baby,” she’d think to herself, and then she’d be so overwhelmed by the wonder of it she’d splash the water with the flats of her palms like a kid thinking about Christmas. She was turning thirty soon, with a terrifying mortgage and a husband and a baby on the way, but she didn’t feel that different from when she was fifteen.Except, there were no moments of bliss after grocery shopping when she was fifteen. She hadn’t met Nick yet. Her heart still had to be broken a few times before he could turn up and superglue it together with words like “besotted.”“Alice? Are you okay? Please open your eyes.”It was a woman’s voice. Too loud and strident to ignore. It dragged her up into consciousness and wouldn’t let her go.It was a voice that gave Alice a familiar irritated itch of a feeling, like too-tight stockings.This person did not belong in her bedroom.She rolled her head to one side. “Ow!”She opened her eyes.There was a blur of unrecognizable colors and shapes. She couldn’t even see the bedside cabinet to reach for her glasses. Her eyes must be getting worse.She blinked, and blinked again, and then, like a sharpening telescope, everything came into focus. She was looking at someone’s knees. How funny.Knobbly pale knees.She lifted her chin a fraction.“There you are!”It was Jane Turner of all people, from work, kneeling next to her. Her face was flushed and she had strands of sweaty hair pasted to her forehead. Her eyes looked tired. She had a soft, pudgy neck Alice had never noticed before. She was wearing a T-shirt with huge sweat marks and shorts and her arms were thin and white with dark freckles. Alice had never seen so much of Jane’s body before. It was embarrassing. Poor old Jane.“Listeria, wisteria,” said Alice, to be humorous.“You’re delirious,” said Jane. “Don’t try and sit up.”“Hmmph,” said Alice. “Don’t want to sit up.” She had a feeling she wasn’t in bed; she seemed to be lying flat on her back on a cool laminated floor. Was she drunk? Had she forgotten she was pregnant and got deliriously drunk?Her obstetrician was an urbane man who wore a bow tie and had a round face disconcertingly similar to that of one of Alice’s ex-boyfriends. He said he didn’t have a problem with “say, an aperitif followed by one glass of wine with dinner.” Alice thought an aperitif must be a particular brand of drink. (“Oh, Alice,” said Elisabeth.) Nick explained that an aperitif was a predinner drink. Nick came from an aperitif-drinking family. Alice came from a family with one dusty bottle of Baileys sitting hopefully in the back of the pantry behind the tins of spaghetti. In spite of what the obstetrician said, she’d only had a half a glass of champagne since she’d done the pregnancy test and she felt guilty about that even though everybody kept saying it was fine.“Where am I?” asked Alice, terrified of the answer. Was she in some seedy nightclub? How could she explain to Nick that she forgot she was pregnant?“You’re at the gym,” said Jane. “You fell and knocked yourself out. Gave me an absolute heart attack, although I was sort of grateful for the excuse to stop.”The gym? Alice didn’t go to gyms. Had she woken up drunk in a gym?“You lost your balance,” said a sharp, jolly voice. “It was quite a fall! Gave us all a shock, you silly sausage! We’ve called an ambulance, so don’t you worry, we’ve got professional help on the way!”Kneeling next to Jane was a thin, coffee-tanned girl with a bleachedblond ponytail, shiny Lycra shorts, and a cropped red top with the words SPIN CRAZY emblazoned across it. Alice felt instant dislike for her. She didn’t like being called a silly sausage. It offended her dignity. One of Alice’s faults, according to her sister Elisabeth, was a tendency to take herself too seriously.“Did I faint?” asked Alice hopefully. Pregnant women fainted. She had never fainted in her life, although she spent most of fourth grade practicing, in the hope that she could be one of those lucky girls who fainted during church and had to be carried out, draped across the muscly arms of their PE teacher, Mr. Gillespie.“It’s just that I’m pregnant,” she said. Let her see who she was calling a silly sausage.Jane’s mouth dropped. “Jesus, Alice, you are not!”Spin Crazy Girl pursed her mouth as if she’d caught Alice out being naughty. “Oh dear, sweetie, I did ask at the beginning of the class if anyone was pregnant. I would have put you up front near the fan. You shouldn’t have been so shy.”Alice’s head thumped. Nothing anybody said was making sense.“Pregnant,” said Jane. “At this time. What a disaster.”“It is not!” Alice put a protective hand to her stomach, so the Sultana wouldn’t hear and be offended. Their financial situation was none of Jane’s business. People were meant to be delighted when you announced a pregnancy.“I mean, what are you going to do?” asked Jane.For heaven’s sake! “Do? What do you mean, what am I going to do? I’m going to have a baby.” She sniffed. “You smell of lavender. I knew I could smell lavender.” Her sense of smell had been extra strong because of the pregnancy.“It’s my deodorant.” Jane really didn’t look like herself. Her eyes didn’t look right. It was quite noticeable. Maybe she needed to start using some sort of eye cream.“Are you all right, Jane?”Jane snorted. “I’m fine. Worry about yourself, woman. You’re the pregnant one knocking yourself out.”The baby! She’d been selfishly thinking about her sore head when she should have been worrying about the poor little Sultana. What sort of a mother was she going to be?She said, “I hope I didn’t hurt the baby when I fell.”“Oh, babies are pretty tough, I wouldn’t worry about that.”It was another woman’s voice. For the first time Alice looked up and realized a crowd of red-faced, middle-aged women in sports gear surrounded her. Some of them were leaning forward, staring at her with avid road-accident interest, while others had their hands on their hips and were chatting to one another as if they were at a party. They seemed to be in a small, fluorescentlit room. She could hear tinny music somewhere in the distance, clanking metal sounds, and a sudden burst of loud masculine laughter. As she lifted her head, she saw that the room was filled with stationary bikes, all crammed together and facing the same direction.“Although, you shouldn’t really be doing exercise that gets your heart rate up too high if you’re pregnant,” said another woman.“But I don’t do any exercise,” said Alice. “I should do more exercise.”“You, my girl, couldn’t do any more exercise if you tried,” said Jane.“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looked around at the strange faces surrounding her. This was all so . . . silly. “I don’t know where I am.”“She’s probably got a concussion,” said somebody excitedly. “Concussed people are dazed and disoriented.”Spin Crazy Girl looked frightened and stroked Alice’s arm. “Oh dear, sweetie, YOU MIGHT BE JUST A LITTLE BIT CONCUSSED,” she yelled.“Yes, but I don’t think that makes her deaf,” said Jane tersely. She lowered her voice and bent her head toward Alice. “Everything is fine. You’re at the gym, you were doing your Friday spin class, the one you’ve been wanting to drag me along to for ages, remember? Can’t quite see the attraction, actually. Anyway, you must have got dizzy, or fainted or something, because one minute you were riding like a madwoman and next thing you were crashing to the floor. You’re going to be fine. More importantly, why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”“What’s a Friday spin class?” asked Alice.“Oh, this is bad,” said Jane excitedly.“The ambulance is here!” someone said.Spin Crazy Girl became goofy with relief. She bounded to her feet and shooed at the ladies like an energetic housewife with a broom. “Right, gang, let’s give them some space, shall we?”Jane stayed kneeling on the floor next to Alice, patting her distractedly on the shoulder. Then she stopped patting. “Oh, my. Why do you get all the fun?”Alice twisted her head and saw two handsome men in blue overalls striding toward them, carrying first aid equipment. Embarrassed, she struggled to sit up.“Stay there, honey,” called out the taller one.“He looks just like George Clooney,” breathed Jane in her ear. He did, too. Alice couldn’t help but feel cheerier. It seemed she’d woken up in an episode of ER.“Hey, there.” George Clooney squatted down next to them, big hands resting between his knees. “What’s your name?”“Jane,” said Jane. “Oh. Her name is Alice.”“What’s your full name, Alice?” George gently took her wrist and pushed two fingers against her pulse.“Alice Mary Love.”“Had a bit of a fall did you, Alice?”“Apparently I did. I don’t remember it.” Alice felt teary and special, as she generally did when she talked to any health professional, even a chemist. She blamed her mother for making too much of a fuss over her when she was sick as a child. She and Elisabeth were both terrible hypochondriacs.“Do you know where you are?” asked George.“Not really,” said Alice. “Apparently I’m in a gym.”“She fell off her bike during the spin class.” Jane adjusted her bra strap beneath her top. “I saw it happen. I’m pretty sure she fainted. Her head smashed against the handlebars of the bike next to her. She’s been unconscious for about ten minutes.”Spin Crazy Girl reappeared, ponytail swinging, and Alice stared up at her smooth long legs and hard flat stomach. It looked like a pretend stomach. “She can’t have had her feet strapped to the pedals properly. I do make a point of reminding everyone about that at the beginning of the class. It’s a safety issue,” said Spin Crazy Girl to George Clooney in the confidential tone of one professional talking to another. “Also, I really don’t recommend spin classes to pregnant women. I did ask if anyone was pregnant.”“Don’t worry, we’ll sue if necessary,” said Jane quietly to Alice.“How many weeks are you, Alice?” asked George.Alice went to answer and to her surprise found a blank space in her head.“Thirteen,” she said, after a second. “I mean, fourteen. Fourteen weeks.” They’d had the twelve-week ultrasound at least two weeks ago. The Sultana had done a peculiar little jump, like a disco dance move, as if someone had poked it in the back, and afterward Nick and Alice had kept trying to replicate the movement for people. Everyone had been polite and said it was remarkable.She put a hand to her stomach again and for the first time she noticed what she was wearing. Sneakers and white socks. Black shorts and a yellow sleeveless top with a shiny gold-foil sticker stuck to her top. It seemed to be a picture of a dinosaur with a balloon coming out of its mouth saying, “ROCK ON.” Rock on?“Where did these clothes come from?” she asked Jane accusingly. “These aren’t my clothes.”Jane raised a meaningful eyebrow at George.“There’s a dinosaur stuck to my shirt,” said Alice, awestruck.“What day of the week is it today, Alice?” asked George.“Friday,” answered Alice. She was cheating, because Jane had told her they were doing a “Friday spin class.” Whatever that was.“Remember what you had for breakfast?” George gently examined the side of her head while he talked. The other paramedic strapped a blood-pressure monitor to her upper arm and pumped it up.“Peanut butter on toast?”That was what she generally had for breakfast. It seemed a safe bet.“He doesn’t actually know what you had for breakfast,” said Jane. “He’s trying to see if you remember what you had for breakfast.”The blood-pressure monitor squeezed hard around Alice’s arm.George sat back on his haunches and said, “Humor me, Alice, and tell me the name of our illustrious prime minister.”“John Howard,” answered Alice obediently. She hoped there wouldn’t be any more questions about politics. It wasn’t her forte. She could never get appalled enough.Jane made a strange explosive sound of derision and mirth.“Oh. Ah. But he’s still the prime minister, isn’t he?” Alice was mortified. People were going to tease her about this for years to come. Oh, Alice, you don’t know the prime minister! Had she missed an election? “But I’m sure he’s the prime minister.”“And what year is it?” George didn’t seem too concerned.“It’s 1998,” Alice answered promptly. She felt confident about that one. The baby would be born next year, in 1999.Jane pressed her hand over her mouth. George went to speak, but Jane interrupted him. She put her hand on Alice’s shoulder and stared at her intently. Her eyes were wide with excitement. Tiny balls of mascara hovered on the ends of her eyelashes. The combination of her lavender deodorant and garlic breath was quite overpowering.“How old are you, Alice?”“I’m twenty-nine, Jane.” Alice was irritated by Jane’s dramatic tone. What was she getting at? “Same age as you.”Jane sat back up and looked at George Clooney triumphantly.She said, “I just got an invitation to her fortieth birthday.”That was the day Alice Mary Love went to the gym and carelessly misplaced a decade of her life. Chapter 2 Jane said of course she would have come to the hospital with her but she had to be in court at two o’clock.“What are you going to court for?” asked Alice, who was perfectly happy not to have Jane come to the hospital. That was quite enough of Jane for one day. “An invitation to her fortieth birthday.” What exactly did she mean by that?Jane smiled oddly and didn’t answer Alice’s question about court. “I’ll call someone to be there at the hospital waiting for you.”“Not someone.” Alice watched the paramedics set up a stretcher for her. It looked a bit flimsy. “Nick.”“Yes, of course, I’ll call Nick.” Jane enunciated her words carefully, as if she were acting in a children’s pantomime.“Actually, I’m sure I can walk,” Alice said to George Clooney. She never liked the idea of being lifted by people, even Nick, who was pretty strong. She worried about her weight. What if the paramedics grunted and grimaced like furniture removalists when they lifted the stretcher? “I feel fine. Just my head.”“You’re suffering from a pretty serious concussion there,” said George. “We can’t muck around with head injuries.”“Come on now, our favorite part of the job is carrying attractive women around on stretchers,” said the other paramedic. “Don’t deprive us.”“Yes, don’t deprive them, Alice,” said Jane. “Your brain is damaged. You think you’re twenty-nine.”What did that mean, exactly?Alice lay back and allowed the two men to efficiently lift her onto the stretcher. As her head rolled to one side, the pain made her dizzy.“Oh, here’s her bag.” Jane picked up a rucksack from the side of the room and squashed it next to Alice.“That’s not mine,” said Alice.“Yes it is.”Alice stared at the red canvas bag. There was a row of three shiny dinosaur stickers like the one on her shirt stuck across the top flap. She wondered if she was about to be sick.The two paramedics lifted up the stretcher. They didn’t seem to have a problem carrying it. She guessed it was their job to lift all-sized people.“Work!” said Alice in a sudden panic. “You’d better call work for me. Why aren’t we at work if it’s a Friday?”“Well, I really don’t know! Why aren’t we at work?” repeated Jane in that pantomime voice again. “But don’t you worry a thing about it, I’ll call ‘Nick,’ and then I’ll call ‘work.’ So by work I assume you mean, ah, ABR Bricks?”“Yes, Jane, I do,” said Alice carefully. They’d been working at ABR for three years now. Could the poor girl have some sort of mental illness?Alice said, “You’d better let Sue know I won’t be in today.”“Sue,” repeated Jane slowly. “And by Sue, I take it you mean Sue Mason.”“Yes, Jane. Sue Mason.” (Definitely loopy.)Sue Mason was their boss. She was a stickler for punctuality and medical certificates and appropriate work attire. Alice couldn’t wait for her maternity leave to start so she could get out of the place.“Get better soon, Alice!” Spin Crazy Girl called out from the front of the room, her voice amplified by a microphone strapped to her head. She was sitting astride a bike up on a small raised platform, facing the class. There was a television screen flickering above her head and a huge rotating fan next to her. All of the women except for Jane had climbed back onto their bikes and were pedaling slowly, their eyes fixed on some invisible horizon. As Alice’s stretcher reached the door, there was a burst of loud throbbing music and the lights in the room suddenly went out, plunging them into darkness. “Let’s go, team!” shouted Spin Crazy Girl. “We’ve got to make up for lost time! Where were we?”“Stuck behind a semi-trailer halfway up the mountain!” shouted one of the women.“That’s right! Let’s push it up a notch! Push it, push it, push it . . . and out of the saddle!”The women’s bottoms lifted simultaneously in the air as they stood up on their pedals, their strong legs pumping like pistons.Goodness, thought Alice.Jane propped a heavy glass door open with her foot, and Alice clutched the sides of the stretcher, worried that they’d have to turn her on an angle, like a sofa, but the paramedics carried her smoothly through.“You’ll be fine,” said Jane, giving one of Alice’s sneakers a jaunty pat.The glass door closed, and the music’s volume was suddenly reduced to the sound of a distant party. Alice could see Jane’s face through the glass, watching them go. She was pinching her lower lip together with her finger and thumb, so she looked like a fish.She must remember every moment of this freaky day to tell Nick. He’d think it was hilarious. Yes, this whole day was quite a hoot.Now she was being carried through another, much larger, blue-carpeted room, with rows of complicated-looking machinery being operated by men and women who all seemed to be straining to lift, pull, or push things that were far too heavy for them. The place had the studious, muted feel of a library. Nobody stopped what they were doing as the stretcher went by. Only their eyes followed with blank, impersonal interest, as if she were a news event on TV.“Alice!”A man stepped off a treadmill, pushing his headphones down from his ears and onto his shoulders. “What happened to you?”His face—bright red and beaded with sweat—meant nothing to her. Alice stared up at him, groping for something polite to say. It was surreal, making conversation with a stranger while lying flat on her back on a stretcher. She was in one of those dreams where she turned up at a cocktail party in her pajamas.“Fell off her bike and got a bit of a bump on the noggin,” George Clooney answered for her, sounding not at all medical.“Oh no!” The man smeared a towel across his forehead. “Just what you need, with the big day coming up!”Alice attempted to pull a rueful face about the big day coming up. Perhaps he was one of Nick’s colleagues and it was some work function she was meant to know about?“Well, that’ll teach you to be such a gym addict, eh, Alice?”“Ho,” said Alice. She wasn’t sure what she’d been trying to say, but that’s what it came out as: “Ho.”As the paramedics kept walking, the man climbed back onto his treadmill and started running, calling out after her, “Take care, Alice! I’ll get Maggie to call!” He held up his thumb and little finger to his ear.Alice closed her eyes. Her stomach churned.“You doing okay there, Alice?” asked George Clooney.Alice opened her eyes. “I feel a bit sick,” she said.“That’s to be expected.”They stopped in front of a lift.“I really don’t know where I am,” she reminded George. She felt like it was worth mentioning again.“Don’t worry about it for now,” said George.The lift doors hissed open and a woman with sleek bobbed hair stepped out. “Alice! Are you okay? What happened?” She had one of those “How now, brown cow” accents. “What a coincidence! I was just thinking about you! I was going to call you about the—ahh, the little incident—at school, Chloe told me about it, you poor thing! Oh dear, this is all you need! What with tomorrow night, and the big day coming up!”As she kept talking, the paramedics maneuvered the stretcher into the lift and pressed the “G” button. The doors slid shut on the woman lifting a pretend phone to her ear just like the treadmill guy, while at the same time a voice cried out, “Is that Alice Love I just saw on that stretcher?”George said, “You know a lot of people.”“No,” said Alice. “No, I really don’t.”She thought about Jane saying, “I just got an invitation to her fortieth birthday.”She turned her head and was sick all over George Clooney’s nice, shiny black shoes.Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. HodgesIt was just toward the end of the lunch break when I got the call. I only had five minutes before I was back on and I should have been in the bathroom checking I didn’t have food between my teeth. She said, “Elisabeth, oh, hi, it’s Jane, I’ve got a problem here,” as if there was only one Jane in the whole world (you would think somebody named Jane would be in the habit of giving their last name) and I was thinking Jane, Jane, a Jane with a problem, and then I realized it was Jane Turner. Alice’s Jane.She said that Alice had fallen over at the gym during her spin class.So there I was with 143 people all sitting back behind their tables, pouring their ice water, eating their mints, looking expectantly at the podium with pens poised, who had each paid $2,950 to see me speak, or $2,500 if they took advantage of the Early Bird discount.That’s how much people pay me to teach them how to write a successful direct-mail campaign. I know! That nasty commercial world out there is entirely foreign to you, isn’t it, Dr. Hodges? I could tell you were just politely nodding your head when I tried to explain my job. I’m sure it has never occurred to you that those letters and brochures you receive in the mail are actually written by real people. Real people like me. I bet you have a “NO JUNK MAIL” sticker on your letterbox. Don’t worry. I won’t hold it against you.Anyway, it wasn’t exactly the most convenient time for me to go rushing off to see my sister because she’d had a gym accident (some of us have jobs; some of us don’t have time to go to the gym in the middle of the day). Especially when I wasn’t talking to her since the banana muffins incident. I know we talked at length about trying to see her actions from a more “rational perspective,” but I’m still not talking to her. (Of course she doesn’t actually KNOW I’m not talking to her, but allow me my childish satisfaction.)I said to Jane (somewhat irritably and self-importantly, I admit), “Is it serious?” For some reason it never occurred to me that it really could be serious.Jane said, “She thinks it’s 1998 and she’s twenty-nine and we’re still working together at ABR Bricks, so it’s seriously weird, that’s for sure.”Then she said, “Oh, and I assume you know she’s pregnant?”I am deeply ashamed of my reaction. All I can say, Dr. Hodges, is that it was as involuntary and unstoppable as a huge hay-fevery sneeze.It was a feeling of trembly rage and it went from my stomach to my head in a WHOOSH, and I said, “I’m sorry, Jane, I have to go now,” and hung up.George Clooney was very nice about his shoes. Alice was appalled and tried to climb out of the stretcher so she could somehow help clean them, if she could have just found a tissue from somewhere, perhaps in that strange canvas bag, but both paramedics got stern with her and insisted that she stay still.Her stomach felt better when she was buckled into the back of the ambulance. The chunky clean white plastic all around her was reassuring; everything felt sensible and sterile.It seemed to be quite a sedate trip to the hospital, like catching a cab. As far as Alice could tell, they weren’t screeching through the streets, flashing their lights at other cars to get out of the way.“So I guess I’m not dying, then?” she asked George. The other guy was driving and George Clooney was in the back with Alice. He had hairy eyebrows, she noticed. Nick had big bushy eyebrows, too. Late one night Alice had tried to pluck them for him and he’d yelled so loud, she was worried Mrs. Bergen from next door would do her neighborhood-watch duty and call the police.“You’ll be back at the gym in no time,” answered George.“I don’t go to the gym,” said Alice. “I don’t believe in gyms.”“I’m with you.” George smiled and patted her arm.She watched bits of billboards and office buildings and sky flash by through the ambulance window behind George’s head.Okay, so this was all very silly. It was only the “bump on the noggin” that was making everything seem strange. This was just a longer, more intense version of that funny, dreamlike feeling you got when you woke up on holiday and couldn’t think where you were. There was no need to panic. This was interesting! She just needed to focus.“What time is it?” she asked George determinedly.“Nearly lunchtime,” he said, glancing at his watch.Right. Lunchtime. Lunchtime on a Friday.She said, “Why did you ask what I had for breakfast before?”“It’s one of those standard questions we ask people with head injuries. We’re trying to ascertain your mental state.”So presumably if she could remember what she had for breakfast, everything else would fall into place.Breakfast. This morning. Oh, come on now. She must be able to remember.The idea of a weekday breakfast was clear in her mind. It was two pieces of toast popping up in tandem from the toaster and the kettle bubbling crossly and the morning light slanting across the kitchen floor, just in front of the fridge, lighting up the big brown splotch on the linoleum, which looked like it could be scrubbed away in a jiffy, but most certainly couldn’t. It was glancing up at the railway clock Nick’s mother had given them as a housewarming present, with the fervent hope that it might be earlier than she thought (it was always later). It was the crackly background sound of ABC morning radio—worried, intense voices talking about world issues. Nick listened and sometimes said things like “You’ve got to be kidding,” and Alice let the voices wash over her and tried to pretend she was still asleep.She and Nick were not morning people. They liked this about each other, having both been in previous relationships with intolerably cheery morning people. They spoke in short, terse sentences and sometimes it was a game, exaggerating their grumpiness, and sometimes it wasn’t, and that was fine, because they knew their real selves would be back that evening after work.She tried to think of a specific breakfast memory.There was that chilly morning when they were halfway through painting the kitchen. It was raining hard outside and there was a strong smell of paint fumes tickling her nostrils as they silently ate peanut butter on toast sitting on the floor, because all the furniture was covered with drop sheets. Alice was still in her nightie, but she’d put a cardigan on over the top of it, and she was wearing Nick’s old football socks pulled up to her knees. Nick was shaved, and dressed, except for his tie. The night before he’d told her about a really important scary presentation he had to give to the Shiny-headed Twerp, the Motherfucking Megatron, and the Big Kahuna all at the same time. Alice, who was terrified of public speaking, had felt her own stomach clench in sympathy. That morning Nick took a sip of his tea, put down his mug, opened his mouth to bite the toast, and dropped it onto his favorite blue-striped shirt. It stuck right to the front of his shirt. Their eyes met in mutual shock. Nick slowly peeled off the toast to reveal a big greasy rectangle of peanut butter. He said, in the tone of a man who has just been fatally shot, “That was my only clean shirt,” and then he took the piece of toast and slammed it against his forehead.Alice said, “No it’s not. I took a load while you were at squash last night.” They didn’t have a washing machine yet and they were taking all their clothes to the laundry down the road. Nick took the squished-up toast off his face and said, “You didn’t,” and she said, “I did,” and he crawled through tins of paint and put both hands on her face and gave her a long, tender, peanut-buttery kiss.But that wasn’t this morning’s breakfast. That was months ago, or weeks ago, or something. The kitchen was finished. She hadn’t been pregnant then either. She was still drinking coffee.There were a few breakfasts in a row where they were on a health kick and they had yogurt with fruit. When was that? The health kick didn’t last very long, even though they were pretty gung ho about it in the beginning.There were breakfasts when Nick was away for work. She ate her toast in bed when he was away, relishing the romantic pain of missing him, as if he were a sailor or a soldier. It was like enjoying feeling hungry when you knew you’d be having a huge dinner.There was that breakfast where they had a fight—faces ugly, eyes blazing, doors slamming—about running out of milk. That wasn’t so nice. (That breakfast definitely wasn’t this morning. She remembered how they forgave each other that night while they were watching Nick’s youngest sister acting a tiny part in a stupendously long postmodern play that neither of them could understand. “By the way, I forgive you,” Nick had leaned over and whispered in her ear, and she’d whispered back, “Excuse me, I forgive you,” and a woman in front had turned around and hissed, “Shhh! Both of you!” like an angry schoolteacher and they’d got the giggles so badly, they ended up having to leave the theater, clambering past knees and getting into terrible trouble afterward from Nick’s sister.)There was a breakfast where she’d grumpily read out possible baby names from a book while he’d grumpily said yes or no. That was nice, because they were definitely both only pretending to be grumpy that morning. “I can’t believe they let us name a person,” Nick had said. “It feels like something only the King of the Land should be able to do.” “Or the Queen of the Kingdom,” Alice said. “Oh, they’d never let a woman name a person,” said Nick. “Obviously.”Did that happen this morning? No. That was . . . some time. Not this morning.She had absolutely no idea what she’d eaten for breakfast that morning.She confessed to George Clooney, “I just said I had peanut butter on toast because that’s my normal breakfast. I can’t actually remember anything about breakfast at all.”“That’s fine, Alice,” he answered. “I don’t think I can remember what I had for breakfast myself.”“Oh.” Well, so much for ascertaining her mental state! Did George actually know what he was doing?“Maybe you’ve got concussion, too,” said Alice. George laughed dutifully. He seemed to be losing interest in her. Maybe he was hoping his next patient would be more interesting. He probably liked using those heart defibrillator thingummies. Alice would if she were a paramedic.One Sunday, when Nick had a hangover and she was trying to convince him to go to the beach with her and he was lying on the couch with his eyes closed, ignoring her, she said, “Oh, no, he’s flatlining!” and rubbed two spatulas together before pressing them to his chest, yelling, “Clear!” Nick obligingly gave a realistic spasm right on cue. He still wouldn’t move, until she cried, “He’s not breathing! We’ve got to intubate him—now!” and tried to shove a straw down his throat.The ambulance pulled up at a traffic light and Alice shifted slightly. Everything felt wrong about her body. She felt an overwhelming tiredness deep in her bones, as if she could sleep forever, but at the same time a jittery, twitchy energy making her want to get up and achieve something. It must be the pregnancy. Everyone said your body didn’t feel like yours anymore.She lowered her chin to look again at the strange, damp clothes she was wearing. They didn’t even look like something she’d choose. She never wore yellow. The panicky feeling rose up again and she looked away and back up at the ambulance ceiling.The thing was, she couldn’t remember what she had for dinner last night either. Nothing. It wasn’t even on the tip of her tongue.Her chicken thing with the beans? Nick’s favorite lamb curry? She had no idea.Of course, weekdays always tended to mulch together anyway. She would try to remember what she did last weekend.A tangled jumble of memories from various weekends poured into her head as if from an upturned laundry basket. Sitting on the grass in the park, reading the paper. Picnics. Walking around garden centers, arguing about plants. Working on the house. Always, always working on the house. Movies. Dinners. Coffee with Elisabeth. Sunday-morning sex, followed by sleep, followed by croissants from the Vietnamese bakery. Friends’ birthdays. An occasional wedding. Trips away. Things with Nick’s family.Somehow she knew that none of them had happened last weekend. She couldn’t tell when they’d happened. A short time ago or a long time ago. They’d just happened.The problem was that she couldn’t attach herself to a “today” or a “yesterday” or even a “last week.” She was floating helplessly above the calendar like an escaped balloon.An image came into her head of a gray cloudy sky filled with bunches of pink balloons tied together with white ribbon like bouquets. The balloon bouquets were being whipped ferociously about by an angry wind, and she felt a great wrench of sadness.The feeling disappeared like a wave of nausea.Goodness. What was that all about?She longed for Nick. He would be able to fix everything. He would tell her exactly what they ate for dinner last night and what they did on the weekend.Hopefully he would be waiting for her at the hospital. He might have already bought flowers for her. He probably had. She hoped he hadn’t because it was far too extravagant.Of course, really, she hoped he had. She’d been in an ambulance. She sort of deserved them.The ambulance came to a stop and George leapt to his feet, ducking down so as not to bump his head.“We’re here, Alice! How are you feeling? You look like you’ve been thinking deeply profound thoughts.”He pushed the lever to open the back door of the ambulance and sunlight flooded in, making her blink.“I never asked your name,” said Alice.“Kevin,” answered George apologetically, as if he knew it would be a disappointment.Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. HodgesThe truth is that sometimes my work gives me a little “rush,” Dr. Hodges. I’m embarrassed to admit it. Not a huge rush. But a definite shot of adrenaline. When the lights go dim and the audience goes quiet and it’s just me up there alone on the stage and my assistant Layla gives me her dead-serious “OK” signal as if this is a NASA space launch we’re running. The spotlight like sunshine on my face, and all I can hear is the clinking of water glasses and maybe a respectfully restrained cough or two. I like that clean, crisp, no-nonsense smell of hotel function rooms and the chilly air-conditioned air. It clears out my head. And when I speak the microphone smooths out my voice, giving it authority.But then again, other times, I walk onto the stage and I feel like there is some weight pressing on the back of my neck, making my head droop and my back hunch, like an old crone. I want to put my mouth close to the microphone and say, “What is the point of all this, ladies and gentlemen? You all seem like nice enough people, so help me out and tell me, what is the point?”Actually, I do know the point.The point is they’re helping pay the mortgage. They’re each making a contribution to our groceries and our electricity and our water and our Visa. They’re all generously chipping in for the syringes and the shapeless hospital gowns and that last anaesthetist with the kind, doggy eyes who held my hand and said, “Go to sleep now, darling.” Anyway, I digress. You want me to digress. You want me to just write and write whatever comes to my mind. I wonder if you find me boring. You always look gently interested, but maybe you have days where I walk in the office looking all needy, bursting to tell you all the pathetic details of my life, and you just long to put your elbows on your desk and your chin in your hands and say, “What is the point of all this, Elisabeth?” and then you remember that the point is that I am paying for your Visa, mortgage, grocery bills . . . and so the world goes around.You mentioned the other day that a feeling of pointlessness is a sign of depression, but you see there, I don’t have depression, because I do see the point. Money is the point.After I hung up on Jane, the phone rang again immediately (presumably her—thinking we’d been cut off) and I turned it off mid-ring. A man walking by said, “Sometimes you wonder if we’d all be better off without these damned things!” and I said, “Damned right!” (I have never said “Damned right!” in my life before; it just popped bizarrely into my head. I like it. I might say it our next session and see if you blink) and he said, “Congratulations, by the way. I’ve been to a lot of these sorts of workshops before and I’ve never heard anyone speak such good sense!”He was flirting with me. It happens sometimes. It must be the microphone and the bright lights. It’s funny because I always think it must be obvious to any man that all my sexuality has been sucked out of me. I feel like a piece of dried fruit. Yes, that’s it. I AM A DRIED APRICOT, Dr. Hodges. Not one of those nice, soft, juicy ones, but a hard, shriveled, tasteless dried apricot that hurts your jaw.I took a few deep breaths of bracing air-conditioned air and clipped the microphone back onto my jacket. I was in such a frenzy to get back onstage, I was actually trembling. I feel like I may have become temporarily deranged for a while this afternoon, Dr. Hodges. We can discuss this at our next session.Or maybe temporary insanity is just an excuse for inexcusable behavior. Maybe I’ll be too ashamed to tell you that somebody called to say my only sister had been in an accident and I hung up on her. I package myself for you. I want to sound damaged, so you feel there is something useful for you to do, but at the same time I want you to think I’m a nice person, Dr. Hodges. A nice damaged person.I strode onto that stage like a rock star—and I started talking about “visualizing your prospect” and I was on fire. I had them laughing. I had them competing with each other to yell out answers to me, and the whole time we were visualizing the prospect I was visualizing my little sister.I was thinking, head injuries can be pretty serious.I was thinking, Nick is away and this is not really Jane’s responsibility.And finally I thought: Alice was pregnant with Madison in 1998. Chapter 3 Nick wasn’t waiting at the hospital with flowers for Alice. Nobody was waiting for her, which made her feel slightly heroic.Her two paramedics disappeared as if they’d never existed. She couldn’t recall them actually saying goodbye, so she didn’t get to say thank you.The hospital was all flurries of activity, followed by periods of waiting alone on a stretcher in a small white box of a room, staring at the ceiling.A doctor appeared and shone a tiny pencil-thin torch in her eyes and asked her to follow his fingers back and forth. A nurse with stunning green eyes that matched her hospital uniform stood at the end of her stretcher with a clipboard asking about health insurance and allergies and next of kin. Alice complimented her on her green eyes and the nurse said they were colored contacts and Alice said, “Oh,” and felt duped.An icepack was applied to what the green-eyed nurse described as an “ostrich egg” on the back of her head, and she was given two white tablets in a tiny plastic cup for the pain, but Alice explained the pain wasn’t that bad and she didn’t want to take anything because she was pregnant.People kept asking her questions, in voices that were too loud, as if she were asleep, even though she was looking right at them. Did she remember falling over? Did she remember the trip in the ambulance? Did she know what day of the week it was? Did she know what date it was?“Nineteen ninety-eight?” A harried-looking doctor peered down at her through glasses with red plastic rims. “Are you quite sure about that?”“Yes,” said Alice. “I know it’s 1998 because my baby is due on August eight, 1999. Eighth of the eighth, ninety-nine. Easy to remember.”“Because, you see, it’s actually 2008,” said the doctor.“Well, that’s not possible,” explained Alice as nicely as she could. Maybe this doctor was one of those brilliant people who were hopeless with normal stuff like dates.“And why isn’t it possible?”“Because we haven’t had the new millennium yet,” said Alice cleverly. “Apparently all the power is going to fail because of some computer bug.”She felt proud of knowing that fact; it was sort of current affair–ish.“I think you might be confused. You don’t remember the new millennium? Those great fireworks on the harbor bridge?”“No,” said Alice. “I don’t remember any fireworks.” Please stop it, she wanted to say. This isn’t funny, and I’m just being brave about the pain in my head. It really does hurt.She remembered Nick saying one night, “Do you realize that on New Year’s Eve of the new millennium we will have a toddler?” He was holding a sledgehammer in both hands because he was about to knock down a wall.Alice had lowered the camera she was holding to photograph the end of the wall. “That’s true,” she’d said, amazed and terrified by the thought. A toddler: an actual miniature person, created by them, belonging to them, separate from them.“Yep, guess we’ll have to get a babysitter for the little bugger,” Nick had said with elaborate nonchalance. Then he’d joyfully swung the hammer and Alice had clicked the camera as a shower of pink plaster fragments rained down all over them.“Maybe I should get an ultrasound to check that my baby is okay after the fall,” said Alice firmly to the doctor. This was how Elisabeth would be in a situation like this. Alice always thought “What would Elisabeth do?” whenever she needed to be assertive.“How many weeks pregnant are you?” asked the doctor.“Fourteen,” said Alice, but there was that strange space in her mind again, as if she wasn’t absolutely sure that was correct.“Or you could at least check the heartbeat,” said Alice in her Elisabeth voice.“Mmmm.” The doctor pushed her glasses back up her nose.A memory of a woman’s voice with a gentle American accent came into Alice’s head.“I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.”She remembered it so clearly. The tiny pause after the “sorry.”“I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.”Who was that? Who said that? Did it really happen? Tears welled in Alice’s eyes, and she thought again of those bouquets of pink balloons whipped by the wind in a gray sky. Had she seen those balloons in some long-forgotten movie? Some extremely sad movie? She felt another wave of extraordinary feeling rise in her chest. It was just like in the ambulance. It was a feeling of grief and rage. She imagined herself sobbing, wailing, digging her fingernails into her own flesh (and she’d never behaved like that in her whole life). And just when she thought the feeling would sweep her away, it dissolved into nothing. It was the strangest thing.“How many children do you have?” asked the doctor. She had pulled up Alice’s T-shirt and pushed down her shorts to feel her abdomen.Alice blinked to make the tears go away. “None. This is my first pregnancy.”The doctor stopped and looked at her. “That looks very much like a cesarean scar to me.”Alice lifted her head awkwardly and saw that the doctor was pointing a nicely shaped fingernail low down on Alice’s stomach. She squinted and saw what looked like a very pale, purple line just above the top of her pubic hair.“I don’t know what that is,” said Alice, mortified. She thought of the solemn expression on her mother’s face when she used to tell Elisabeth and Alice, “You must never show your private lady’s parts to anyone.” Nick fell about laughing the first time he heard that. Why hadn’t he noticed that funny scar? He’d spent enough time examining her private lady’s parts.“Your uterus doesn’t seem to be enlarged for fourteen weeks,” commented the doctor.Alice looked again at her stomach and saw that it was actually looking pretty flat. Skinny-person flat, which would normally be an unexpected bonus, except that she was having a baby. Nick had started to chuckle gleefully whenever she wore something that showed the round bulge of her stomach.“Are you sure you’re that far along?” said the doctor.Alice stared at her flat stomach—very flat!—and didn’t say anything. She was filled with confusion and fear and excruciating embarrassment. It occurred to her that her breasts—which had become so heavy and tingly and overtly breasty—felt like they had gone back to their normal humble, unobtrusive state. She didn’t feel pregnant. She certainly didn’t feel like herself, but she didn’t feel pregnant.(What was that scar? She thought of those stories of people drugging you and removing your organs to sell. Had she gone to the gym, got deliriously drunk, and someone had taken the opportunity to help themselves to her organs?)“Maybe I’m not fourteen weeks,” she said to the doctor. “Maybe I’ve got that wrong. I can’t seem to get anything straight in my head. My husband will be here soon. He’ll explain everything.”“Well, you just relax and try not to worry for now.” The doctor readjusted Alice’s clothes with gentle pats. “First we’re going to get you a CT scan and see if you’ve done anything serious to yourself, but I think you’ll find things will start to fall into place soon. Do you remember your obstetrician’s name? I could give him or her a call and check how far along you are. I don’t want to upset you if we can’t find the heartbeat because you’re not far enough along to hear it.”I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.It was such a clear memory. It felt like it really happened.Alice said, “Dr. Sam Chapple. He’s at Chatswood.”“Okay, good. Don’t worry. It’s perfectly normal to feel confused after a serious head injury.”The doctor smiled sympathetically and left the room. Alice watched her go and then lifted up her shirt again to look at her stomach. In addition to being flatter, her stomach had feathery silver lines up and down the sides. Stretch marks. Awestruck, she ran her fingertips over them. Was this really her stomach?A cesarean scar, the doctor had said (unless she’d got it wrong, of course. Maybe it wasn’t a cesarean scar at all, just a perfectly normal . . . scar. Of some sort).But if she was right, that would mean some doctor (her own Dr. Chapple?) had sliced through her skin with a scalpel and lifted a bloody squawling baby straight out of her stomach and she didn’t remember any of it.Could a bump on the head really knock out such a significant event from her memory? Wasn’t that a bit excessive?She thought of times when she’d been watching a movie with Nick and had fallen asleep halfway through with her head on his lap. She hated it because she would wake up sticky-mouthed to see the lives of the movie characters had moved on and the couple who hated each other were now sharing an umbrella under the Eiffel Tower.“You had your baby,” she said tentatively to herself. “Remember?”This was absurd. Surely she wasn’t about to slap herself on the side of the head and say, “Oh, the baby, of course I had the baby! Fancy that slipping my mind.”How could she have forgotten her baby growing and kicking and rolling inside her? If she’d already had the baby, that meant she’d already been to the prenatal classes with Nick. It meant she’d bought her first maternity clothes. It meant they’d painted the nursery. It meant they’d been shopping for a crib and a pram and nappies and a stroller and a changing table.It meant there was a baby.She sat up, her hands pressed to her stomach.So where was it? Who was looking after it? Who was feeding it?This was far bigger than a normal “Oh, Alice” mix-up. This was huge. This was terrifying.For God’s sake, where was Nick? Actually, she was going to be just a bit snappy with him when he finally turned up, even if he did have a good excuse.The nurse with the green eyes came back into the room and said, “How are you feeling?”“Fine, thank you,” said Alice automatically.“Do you remember why you’re here and what happened to you?”This constant re-asking of questions was presumably to check her mental state. Alice thought about yelling, ACTUALLY, I’M GOING OUT OF MY MIND! but she didn’t want to make the nurse feel uncomfortable. Crazy behavior made people feel awkward.Instead, she said to the nurse, “Can you tell me what year it is?” She spoke quickly in case the doctor with the glasses came back in and caught her checking up on her facts behind her back.“It’s 2008.”“It’s definitely 2008?”“It’s definitely second of May, 2008. Mother’s Day next weekend!”Mother’s Day! It would be Alice’s first-ever Mother’s Day.Except, if it was 2008, it wasn’t her first Mother’s Day at all.If it was 2008, the Sultana was ten years old. He wasn’t a sultana at all. He would have progressed from sultana to raisin to peach to tennis ball to basketball to . . . baby.Alice felt an inappropriate gale of laughter catch in her throat.Her baby was ten years old.Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. HodgesMuch to Layla’s horror, I stopped halfway through “Visualizing the Prospect” and switched over to the “Idea Olympics.” I’m sure you’ll be fascinated to hear, Dr. Hodges, that this is the part where I get them to look under their tables and find their “Mystery Product.” Everybody gets pretty excited about this and they dive under the tables. It’s amazing how so many different people can come out with EXACTLY the same jokes. It reinforces this feeling I have that the years are rolling by but nothing is changing. I am the perfect example of the phrase: Going nowhere fast.While all my students were writing down ideas on butcher paper for how to market their Mystery Products, I tried to call Jane back. Only of course now Jane had switched her phone off, so I loudly said “Fuck it” and saw Layla give a tiny, tight smile. I had offended her by changing the agenda, as if the agenda didn’t matter, when the agenda is her life.I explained to her that my sister had been in an accident and I didn’t know what hospital she was at and I needed somebody to pick up her kids from school. Layla said, “Okay, but when are you going to finish the rest of the ‘Visualizing the Prospect’ segment?” (I guess that sort of dedication is good in an employee, but isn’t it a bit pathological, Dr. Hodges? What’s your expert opinion?)I called Mum next and got her voice mail, too. Oh for the days before Mum got a life. It seems only a short time ago that I would have called Frannie first. She was always so calm in a crisis. But Frannie decided to stop driving when she moved into the retirement village. (I still find that weirdly upsetting. She was such a good driver.)I called the school and got put on hold listening to a recorded message about family values. I called Alice’s gym to find out if they knew which hospital she’d been taken to and got put on hold listening to a message about sensible nutrition.Finally, I called my husband, Ben.He answered on the first ring, listened to me babble, and said, “I’ll take care of it.”Look, Grey’s Anatomy starts in ten minutes. This journal writing must not impact on my nightly TV gorge. I don’t care what Ben says, without the narcotic effects of TV, I might have gone truly insane a long time ago. Chapter 4 Apparently Alice’s CT scan was “unremarkable,” which had made her feel ashamed of her mediocrity. It reminded her of her school reports with every single box ticked “Satisfactory” and comments like “A quiet student. Needs to contribute more in class.” They may as well have just come right out and written across the front: “So boring, we don’t actually know who she is.” Elisabeth’s reports had some boxes ticked “Outstanding” and others ticked “Below Standard” and comments like “Can be a little disruptive.” Alice had yearned to be a little disruptive, but she couldn’t work out how you got started.“We’re concerned about your memory loss, so we’re going to keep you overnight for observation,” said the doctor with the red plastic glasses.“Oh, okay, thank you.” Alice self-consciously smoothed her hair back, imagining a row of doctors and nurses with clipboards sitting next to her bed, watching her sleep. (She sometimes snored.)The doctor hugged her own clipboard to her chest and looked at her brightly, as if she felt like a chat.Oh. Gosh. Alice searched around for interesting topics of conversation and finally said, “So, did you ring my obstetrician? Dr. Chapple? Of course, you might not have had a chance . . .” She didn’t want the doctor to snarl, “Sorry, I was busy saving somebody’s life.”The doctor looked thoughtful. “I did, actually. It seems Sam Chapple retired three years ago.” Alice couldn’t believe that Dr. Chapple was no longer sitting in his big leather chair, carefully noting down answers to his courteous questions in beautiful copperplate writing on white index cards. She really needed to get this . . . this problem sorted out once and for all. Pronto! Quick sticks! As Frannie would say. Was Frannie still alive in 2008? Grandmothers died. It was to be expected. You weren’t even allowed to be that upset about it. Please don’t let Frannie have died. Please don’t let anyone have died. “Nobody else in our family will die,” Elisabeth had promised when she was ten and Alice was nine. “Because it wouldn’t be fair.” Alice had believed every single word Elisabeth had said when they were little.Maybe Elisabeth had died? Or Nick? Or Mum? Or the baby? (I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.)For the first time in years, Alice had that feeling she used to get when she was little, after their dad died, that someone else she loved was about to die. She longed to gather everybody she loved and stow them safely under her bed with her favorite dolls. Sometimes the stress would become so overwhelming she would forget how to breathe and Elisabeth would have to bring her a brown paper bag to breathe into.“I might need a bag,” Alice said to the doctor.“A bag?”Ridiculous. She wasn’t a child who hyperventilated at the thought of people dying.“I had a bag,” she said to the doctor. “A red backpack with stickers on it. Do you know what happened to it?”The doctor looked vaguely irritated by this administrative question but then she said, “Oh, yes. Over here. Would you like it?” She picked up the strange backpack from a shelf at the side of the room and Alice looked at it apprehensively.The doctor handed it to her and said, “Well, you just rest up and someone will be along to take you up to a ward soon. I’m sorry there is so much waiting. That’s hospitals for you.” She gave her a motherly pat on the shoulder and quickly left the room, suddenly in a hurry, as if she’d remembered another patient who was waiting.Alice ran her fingers over the three shiny dinosaur stickers on the flap of the backpack. They each had speech bubbles saying either “DINOSAURS RULE!” or “DINOSAURS ROCK!” She looked down at the sticker on her shirt and peeled it off. It was a definite match. She stuck it back on her shirt (she felt that she should for some reason) and waited for a feeling or a memory.Did these belong to the Sultana? Her mind skittered away from the idea, like a frightened animal. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want a readygrown baby. She wanted her own little future baby back.This could not be happening to her. But it is, so get a grip, Alice. She began to open the bag and her fingernails caught her attention. She held up her hands in front of her. Her nails were beautifully shaped and long and painted a very pale, beige color. Normally they were ragged and broken and rimmed with dirt from gardening or painting or whatever other renovation job they were doing at the time. The only other time they’d looked like that was for her wedding when she’d got her manicure. She’d spent the whole honeymoon flapping her hands at Nick, saying, “Look, I’m a lady.”Apart from that, her hands still looked like her hands. Actually, they looked quite nice.They were bare, she noticed. No jewelry. It was a little unusual that she wasn’t at least wearing her wedding ring, but perhaps she’d been in a rush when she was getting ready for her “spin class.”She held up her left hand and saw that there was a thin white indentation from her wedding ring that hadn’t been there before. It gave her a disconnected feeling, like when she’d seen the feathery marks on her stomach. Her mind thought everything was still the same, but her body was telling her that time had marched on without her. Read more

Eat to Live Cookbook: 200 Delicious Nutrient-Rich Recipes for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, Reversing Disease, and Lifelong Health (Eat for Life)

About the Author JOEL FUHRMAN, M.D., is a board-certified family physician and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. Dr. Fuhrman is the research director of the Nutritional Research Foundation. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers Eat to Live, Super Immunity, Eat to Live Cookbook, The End of Dieting, and The End of Diabetes .

A Gathering of Old Men

Review “Gaines knows how to tell a story. . . . [He writes] with humor, a strong sense of drama and a compassionate understanding of people who find themselves in opposing positions.” —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post "Poignant, powerful, earthy . . . a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own." — Booklist “Early in this eloquent novel . . . a sheriff is summoned to a sugarcane plantation, where he finds one young white woman, about eighteen old black men, and one dead Cajun farmer.  The sheriff is sure he knows who killed the Cajun—although each of the men is toting a shotgun only one of them could hit a barn door—but threats and slaps fail to change their stories.  Each one claims guilt, and all but one promise to provoke a riot at the courthouse if the sheriff tries to make an arrest.  In the meantime, they wait for a lynch mob that the dead man's father—like the son, a notorious brute—is sure to launch. . . . Before it is over, everyone involved has been surprised by something; the old black men not least of all, by their first taste of power and pride.” — The New Yorker “A fine novel . . . there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters, and a multiplicity of themes that raises a simple tale to grand signfiicance.” —David Bradley, Philadelphia Inquirer From the Inside Flap isiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man. "Poignant, powerful, earthy...a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own."-- Booklist "A fine novel...there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters."-- Philadelphia Inquirer From the Back Cover Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man. "Poignant, powerful, earthy...a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own."--"Booklist "A fine novel...there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters."--"Philadelphia Inquirer About the Author Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupée Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 1993 Gaines received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his lifetime achievements. In 1996 he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana. Read more

Nineteen Minutes

Review "A master of the craft of storytelling." -- AP Newswire"Picoult spins fast-paced tales of family dysfunction, betrayal, and redemption.... [Her] depiction of these rites of contemporary adolescence is exceptional: unflinching, unjudgmental, utterly chilling." -- The Washington Post "Jodi Picoult's books explore all the shades of gray in a world too often judged in black and white." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch About the Author Jodi Picoult received an AB in creative writing from Princeton and a master’s degree in education from Harvard. The recipient of the 2003 New England Book Award for her entire body of work, she is the author of twenty-seven novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers House Rules , Handle With Care , Change of Heart , and My Sister’s Keeper , for which she received the American Library Association’s Margaret Alexander Edwards Award. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at JodiPicoult.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Nineteen Minutes By Jodi Picoult Washington Square Press Copyright ©2008 Jodi PicoultAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780743496735 March 6, 2007 In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five. Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs. It's the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. It's the driving distance from the Vermont border to the town of Sterling, New Hampshire. In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it. In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge. As usual, Alex Cormier was running late. It took thirty-two minutes to drive from her house in Sterling to the superior court in Grafton County, New Hampshire, and that was only if she speeded through Orford. She hurried downstairs in her stockings, carrying her heels and the files she'd brought home with her over the weekend. She twisted her thick copper hair into a knot and anchored it at the base of her neck with bobby pins, transforming herself into the person she needed to be before she left her house. Alex had been a superior court judge now for thirty-four days. She'd believed that, having proved her mettle as a district court judge for the past five years, this time around the appointment might be easier. But at forty, she was still the youngest judge in the state. She still had to fight to establish herself as a fair justice -- her history as a public defender preceded her into her courtroom, and prosecutors assumed she'd side with the defense. When Alex had submitted her name years ago for the bench, it had been with the sincere desire to make sure people in this legal system were innocent until proven guilty. She just never anticipated that, as a judge, she might not be given the same benefit of the doubt. The smell of freshly brewed coffee drew Alex into the kitchen. Her daughter was hunched over a steaming mug at the kitchen table, poring over a textbook. Josie looked exhausted -- her blue eyes were bloodshot; her chestnut hair was a knotty ponytail. "Tell me you haven't been up all night," Alex said. Josie didn't even glance up. "I haven't been up all night," she parroted. Alex poured herself a cup of coffee and slid into the chair across from her. "Honestly?" "You asked me to tell you something," Josie said. "You didn't ask for the truth." Alex frowned. "You shouldn't be drinking coffee." "And you shouldn't be smoking cigarettes." Alex felt her face heat up. "I don't -- " "Mom," Josie sighed, "even when you open up the bathroom windows, I can still smell it on the towels." She glanced up, daring Alex to challenge her other vices. Alex herself didn't have any other vices. She didn't have time for any vices. She would have liked to say that she knew with authority that Josie didn't have any vices, either, but she would only be making the same inference the rest of the world did when they met Josie: a pretty, popular, straight-A student who knew better than most the consequences of falling off the straight-and-narrow. A girl who was destined for great things. A young woman who was exactly what Alex had hoped her daughter would grow to become. Josie had once been so proud to have a mother as a judge. Alex could remember Josie broadcasting her career to the tellers at the bank, the baggers in the grocery store, the flight attendants on planes. She'd ask Alex about her cases and her decisions. That had all changed three years ago, when Josie entered high school, and the tunnel of communication between them slowly bricked shut. Alex didn't necessarily think that Josie was hiding anything more than any other teenager, but it was different: a normal parent might metaphorically judge her child's friends, whereas Alex could do it legally. "What's on the docket today?" Alex said. "Unit test. What about you?" "Arraignments," Alex replied. She squinted across the table, trying to read Josie's textbook upside down. "Chemistry?" "Catalysts." Josie rubbed her temples. "Substances that speed up a reaction, but stay unchanged by it. Like if you've got carbon monoxide gas and hydrogen gas and you toss in zinc and chromium oxide, and...what's the matter?" "Just having a little flashback of why I got a C in Orgo. Have you had breakfast?" "Coffee," Josie said. "Coffee doesn't count." "It does when you're in a rush," Josie pointed out. Alex weighed the costs of being even five minutes later, or getting another black mark against her in the cosmic good-parenting tally. Shouldn't a seventeen-year-old be able to take care of herself in the morning? Alex started pulling items out of the refrigerator: eggs, milk, bacon. "I once presided over an involuntary emergency admission at the state mental hospital for a woman who thought she was Emeril. Her husband had her committed when she put a pound of bacon in the blender and chased him around the kitchen with a knife, yelling Bam!" Josie glanced up from her textbook. "For real?" "Oh, believe me, I can't make these things up." Alex cracked an egg into a skillet. "When I asked her why she'd put a pound of bacon in the blender, she looked at me and said that she and I must just cook differently." Josie stood up and leaned against the counter, watching her mother cook. Domesticity wasn't Alex's strong point -- she didn't know how to make a pot roast but was proud to have memorized the phone numbers of every pizza place and Chinese restaurant in Sterling that offered free delivery. "Relax," Alex said dryly. "I think I can do this without setting the house on fire." But Josie took the skillet out of her hands and laid the strips of bacon in it, like sailors bunking tightly together. "How come you dress like that?" she asked. Alex glanced down at her skirt, blouse, and heels and frowned. "Why? Is it too Margaret Thatcher?" "No, I mean...why do you bother? No one knows what you have on under your robe. You could wear, like, pajama pants. Or that sweater you have from college that's got holes in the elbows." "Whether or not people see it, I'm still expected to dress...well, judiciously ." A cloud passed over Josie's face, and she busied herself over the stove, as if Alex had somehow given the wrong answer. Alex stared at her daughter -- the bitten half-moon fingernails, the freckle behind her ear, the zigzag part in her hair -- and saw instead the toddler who'd wait at the babysitter's window at sundown, because she knew that was when Alex came to get her. "I've never worn pajamas to work," Alex admitted, "but I do sometimes close the door to chambers and take a nap on the floor." A slow, surprised smile played over Josie's face. She held her mother's admission as if it were a butterfly lighting on her hand by accident: an event so startling you could not call attention to it without risking its loss. But there were miles to drive and defendants to arraign and chemical equations to interpret, and by the time Josie had set the bacon to drain on a pad of paper toweling, the moment had winged away. "I still don't get why I have to eat breakfast if you don't," Josie muttered. "Because you have to be a certain age to earn the right to ruin your own life." Alex pointed at the scrambled eggs Josie was mixing in the skillet. "Promise me you'll finish that?" Josie met her gaze. "Promise." "Then I'm headed out." Alex grabbed her travel mug of coffee. By the time she backed her car out of the garage, her head was already focused on the decision she had to write that afternoon; the number of arraignments the clerk would have stuffed onto her docket; the motions that would have fallen like shadows across her desk between Friday afternoon and this morning. She was caught up in a world far away from home, where at that very moment her daughter scraped the scrambled eggs from the skillet into the trash can without ever taking a single bite. Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure -- a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter -- but it was also a room from which there really wasn't an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn't want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted. She lifted her face to the spray of the shower -- water she'd made so hot it raised red welts, stole breath, steamed windows. She counted to ten, and then finally ducked away from the stream to stand naked and dripping in front of the mirror. Her face was swollen and scarlet; her hair stuck to her shoulders in thick ropes. She turned sideways, scrutinized her flat belly, and sucked it in a little. She knew what Matt saw when he looked at her, what Courtney and Maddie and Brady and Haley and Drew all saw -- she just wished that she could see it, too. The problem was, when Josie looked in the mirror, she noticed what was underneath that raw skin, instead of what had been painted upon it. She understood how she was supposed to look and supposed to act. She wore her dark hair long and straight; she dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch; she listened to Dashboard Confessional and Death Cab for Cutie. She liked feeling the eyes of other girls in the school when she sat in the cafeteria borrowing Courtney's makeup. She liked the way teachers already knew her name on the first day of class. She liked having guys stare at her when she walked down the hall with Matt's arm around her. But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secret -- that some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else's smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real ...and who, when you got right down to it, didn't want to remember, because it hurt even more than this. There wasn't anyone to talk to. If you even doubted your right to be one of the privileged, popular set, then you didn't belong there. And Matt -- well, he'd fallen for the Josie on the surface, like everyone else. In fairy tales, when the mask came off, the handsome prince still loved the girl, no matter what -- and that alone would turn her into a princess. But high school didn't work that way. What made her a princess was hooking up with Matt. And in some weird circular logic, what made Matt hook up with her was the very fact that she was one of Sterling High's princesses. She couldn't confide in her mother, either. You don't stop being a judge just because you step out of the courthouse , her mother used to say. It was why Alex Cormier never drank more than one glass of wine in public; it was why she never yelled or cried. A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period. Many of the accomplishments that Josie's mother was most proud of -- Josie's grades, her looks, her acceptance into the "right" crowd -- had not been achieved because Josie wanted them so badly herself, but mostly because she was afraid of falling short of perfect. Josie wrapped a towel around herself and headed into her bedroom. She pulled a pair of jeans out of her closet and then layered two long-sleeved tees that showed off her chest. She glanced at her clock -- if she wasn't going to be late, she'd have to get moving. Before leaving her room, though, she hesitated. She sank down onto her bed and rummaged underneath the nightstand for the Ziploc sandwich bag that she'd tacked to the wooden frame. Inside was a stash of Ambien -- pirated one pill at a time from her mother's prescription for insomnia, so she'd never notice. It had taken Josie nearly six months to inconspicuously gather only fifteen pills, but she figured if she washed them down with a fifth of vodka, it would do the trick. It wasn't like she had a strategy, really, to kill herself next Tuesday, or when the snow melted, or anything concrete like that. It was more like a backup plan: When the truth came out, and no one wanted to be around her anymore, it stood to reason Josie wouldn't want to be around herself either. She tacked the pills back beneath her nightstand and headed downstairs. As she walked into the kitchen to load up her backpack, she found her chemistry textbook still wide open -- and a long-stemmed red rose marking her place. Matt was leaning against the refrigerator in the corner; he must have let himself in through the open garage door. Like always, he made her head swim with seasons -- his hair was all the colors of autumn; his eyes the bright blue of a winter sky; his smile as wide as any summer sun. He was wearing a baseball hat backward, and a Sterling Varsity Hockey tee over a thermal shirt that Josie had once stolen for a full month and hidden in her underwear drawer, so that when she needed to she could breathe in the scent of him. "Are you still pissed off?" he asked. Josie hesitated. "I wasn't the one who was mad." Matt pushed away from the refrigerator, coming forward until he could link his arms around Josie's waist. "You know I can't help it." A dimple blossomed in his right cheek; Josie could already feel herself softening. "It wasn't that I didn't want to see you. I really did have to study." Matt pushed her hair off her face and kissed her. This was exactly why she'd told him not to come over last night -- when she was with him, she felt herself evaporating. Sometimes, when he touched her, Josie imagined herself vanishing in a puff of steam. He tasted of maple syrup, of apologies. "It's all your fault, you know," he said. "I wouldn't act as crazy if I didn't love you so much." At that moment, Josie could not remember the pills she was hoarding in her room; she could not remember crying in the shower; she could not remember anything but what it felt like to be adored. I'm lucky , she told herself, the word streaming like a silver ribbon through her mind. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Patrick Ducharme, the sole detective on the Sterling police force, sat on a bench on the far side of the locker room, listening to the patrol officers on the morning shift pick on a rookie with a little extra padding around the middle. "Hey, Fisher," Eddie Odenkirk said, "are you the one who's having the baby, or is it your wife?" As the rest of the guys laughed, Patrick took pity on the kid. "It's early, Eddie," he said. "Can't you at least wait to start in until we've all had a cup of coffee?" "I would, Captain," Eddie laughed, "but it looks like Fisher already ate all the donuts and -- what the hell is that?" Patrick followed Eddie's gaze downward, to his own feet. He did not, as a matter of course, change in the locker room with the patrol officers, but he'd jogged to the station this morning instead of driving, to work off too much good cooking consumed over the weekend. He'd spent Saturday and Sunday in Maine with the girl who currently held his heart -- his goddaughter, a five-and-a-half-year-old named Tara Frost. Her mother, Nina, was Patrick's oldest friend, and the one love he probably would never get over, although she managed to be doing quite well without him. Over the course of the weekend, Patrick had deliberately lost ten thousand games of Candy Land, had given countless piggyback rides, had had his hair done, and -- here was his cardinal mistake -- had allowed Tara to put bright pink nail polish on his toes, which Patrick had forgotten to remove. He glanced down at his feet and curled his toes under. "Chicks think it's hot," he said gruffly, as the seven men in the locker room struggled not to snicker at someone who was technically their superior. Patrick yanked his dress socks on, slipped into his loafers, and walked out, still holding his tie. One , he counted. Two, three . On cue, laughter spilled out of the locker room, following him down the hallway. In his office, Patrick closed the door and peered at himself in the tiny mirror on the back. His black hair was still damp from his shower; his face was flushed from his run. He shimmied the knot of his tie up his neck, fashioning the noose, and then sat down at his desk. Seventy-two emails had come in over the weekend -- and usually anything more than fifty meant he wouldn't get home before 8:00 p.m. all week. He began to weed through them, adding notes to a devil's To Do list -- one that never got any shorter, no matter how hard he worked. Today, Patrick had to drive drugs down to the state lab -- not a big deal, except that it was a four-hour block of his day that vanished right there. He had a rape case coming to fruition, the perp identified from a college face book and his statements transcribed and ready for the AG's office. He had a cell phone that had been nabbed out of a car by a homeless guy. He had blood results come back from the lab as a match for a break-in at a jewelry store, and a suppression hearing in superior court, and already on his desk was the first new complaint of the day -- a theft of wallets in which the credit cards had been used, leaving a trail for Patrick to trace. Being a small-town detective required Patrick to be firing on all cylinders, all the time. Unlike cops he knew who worked for city departments, where they had twenty-four hours to solve a case before it was considered cold, Patrick's job was to take everything that came across his desk -- not to cherry-pick for the interesting ones. It was hard to get excited about a bad check case, or a theft that would net the perp a $200 fine when it cost the taxpayers five times that to have Patrick focus on it for a week. But every time he started thinking that his cases weren't particularly important, he'd find himself face-to-face with a victim: the hysterical mother whose wallet had been stolen; the mom-and-pop jewelry store owners who'd been robbed of their retirement income; the rattled professor who was a victim of identity theft. Hope, Patrick knew, was the exact measure of distance between himself and the person who'd come for help. If Patrick didn't get involved, if he didn't give a hundred percent, then that victim was going to be a victim forever -- which was why, since Patrick had joined the Sterling police, he had managed to solve every single case. And yet. When Patrick was lying in his bed alone and letting his mind sew a seam across the hem of his life, he did not remember the proven successes -- only the potential failures. When he walked around the perimeter of a vandalized barn or found the stolen car stripped down and dumped in the woods or handed the tissue to the sobbing girl who'd been date-raped, Patrick couldn't help but feel that he was too late. He was a detective, but he didn't detect anything. It fell into his lap, already broken, every time. It was the first warm day of March, the one where you started to believe that the snow would melt sooner rather than later, and that June was truly just around the corner. Josie sat on the hood of Matt's Saab in the student parking lot, thinking that it was closer to summer than it was to the start of this school year, that in a scant three months, she would officially be a member of the senior class. Beside her, Matt leaned against the windshield, his face tipped up to the sun. "Let's ditch school," he said. "It's too nice out to be stuck inside all day." "If you ditch, you'll be benched." The state championship tournament in hockey began this afternoon, and Matt played right wing. Sterling had won last year, and they had every expectation of doing it again. "You're coming to the game," Matt said, and it wasn't a question, but a statement. "Are you going to score?" Matt smiled wickedly and tugged her on top of him. "Don't I always?" he said, but he wasn't talking about hockey anymore, and she felt a blush rise over the collar of her scarf. Suddenly Josie felt a rain of hail on her back. They both sat up to find Brady Pryce, a football player, walking by hand-in-hand with Haley Weaver, the homecoming queen. Haley tossed a second shower of pennies -- Sterling High's way of wishing an athlete good luck. "Kick ass today, Royston," Brady called. Their math teacher was crossing the parking lot, too, with a worn black leather briefcase and a thermos of coffee. "Hey, Mr. McCabe," Matt called out. "How'd I do on last Friday's test?" "Luckily, you've got other talents to fall back on, Mr. Royston," the teacher said as he reached into his pocket. He winked at Josie as he pitched the coins, pennies that fell from the sky onto her shoulders like confetti, like stars coming loose. It figures , Alex thought as she stuffed the contents of her purse back inside. She had switched handbags and left her pass key at home, which allowed her into the employee entrance at the rear of the superior court. Although she'd pushed the buzzer a million times, no one seemed to be around to let her in. "Goddamn," she muttered under her breath, hiking around the slush puddles so that her alligator heels wouldn't get ruined -- one of the perks of parking in the back was not having to do this. She could cut through the clerk's office to her chambers, and if the planets were aligned, maybe even onto the bench without causing a delay in the docket. Although the public entrance of the court had a line twenty people long, the court officers recognized Alex because, unlike the district court circuit, where you bounced from courthouse to courthouse, she would be ensconced here for six months. The officers waved her to the front of the line, but since she was carrying keys and a stainless steel travel thermos and God only knew what else in her purse, she set off the metal detectors. The alarm was a spotlight; every eye in the lobby turned to see who'd gotten caught. Ducking her head, Alex hurried across the polished tile floor and nearly lost her footing. As she pitched forward, a squat man reached forward to steady her. "Hey, baby," he said, leering. "I like your shoes." Without responding, Alex yanked herself out of his grasp and headed toward the clerk's office. None of the other superior court judges had to deal with this. Judge Wagner was a nice guy, but with a face that looked like a pumpkin left to rot after Halloween. Judge Gerhardt -- a fellow female -- had blouses that were older than Alex. When Alex had first come to the bench, she'd thought that being a relatively young, moderately attractive woman was a good thing -- a vote against typecasting -- but on mornings like this, she wasn't so sure. She dumped her purse in chambers, shrugged into her robe, and took five minutes to drink her coffee and review the docket. Each case got its own file, but cases for repeat offenders were rubber-banded together, and sometimes judges wrote Post-it notes to each other inside about the case. Alex opened one and saw a picture of a stick-figure man with bars in front of his face -- a signal from Judge Gerhardt that this was the offender's last chance, and that next time, he should go to jail. She rang the buzzer to signify to the court officer that she was ready to start, and waited to hear her cue: " All rise, the Honorable Alexandra Cormier presiding ." Walking into a courtroom, to Alex, always felt as if she were stepping onto a stage for the first time at a Broadway opening. You knew there would be people there, you knew their gazes would all be focused on you, but that didn't prevent you from having a moment when you could not breathe, could not believe you were the one they had come to see. Alex moved briskly behind the bench and sat down. There were seventy arraignments scheduled for that morning, and the courtroom was packed. The first defendant was called, and he shuffled past the bar with his eyes averted. "Mr. O'Reilly," Alex said, and as the man met her gaze she recognized him as the guy from the lobby. He was clearly uncomfortable, now that he realized whom he'd been flirting with. "You're the gentleman who assisted me earlier, aren't you?" He swallowed. "Yes, Your Honor." "If you'd known I was the judge, Mr. O'Reilly, would you have said, 'Hey, baby, I like your shoes'?" The defendant glanced down, weighing impropriety against honesty. "I guess so, Your Honor," he said after a moment. "Those are great shoes." The entire courtroom went still, anticipating her reaction. Alex smiled broadly. "Mr. O'Reilly," she said, "I couldn't agree more." Lacy Houghton leaned over the bed railing and put her face right in front of her sobbing patient's. "You can do this," she said firmly. "You can do this, and you will." After sixteen hours of labor, they were all exhausted -- Lacy, the patient, and the father-to-be, who was facing zero-hour with the dawning realization that he was superfluous, that right now, his wife wanted her midwife much more than she wanted him. "I want you to get behind Janine," Lacy told him, "and brace her back. Janine, I want you to look at me and give me another good push..." The woman gritted her teeth and bore down, losing all sense of herself in the effort to create someone else. Lacy reached down to feel the baby's head, to guide it past the seal of skin and quickly loop the cord over its head without ever losing eye contact with her patient. "For the next twenty seconds, your baby is going to be the newest person on this planet," Lacy said. "Would you like to meet her?" The answer was a pressured push. A crest of intention, a roar of purpose, a sluice of slick, purpled body that Lacy quickly lifted into the mother's arms, so that when the infant cried for the first time in this life, she would already be in a position to be comforted. Her patient started weeping again -- tears had a whole different melody, didn't they, without the pain threaded through them? The new parents bent over their baby, a closed circle. Lacy stepped back and watched. There was plenty of work left for a midwife to do even after the moment of birth, but for right now, she wanted to make eye contact with this little being. Where parents would notice a chin that looked like Aunt Marge's or a nose that resembled Grandpa's, Lacy would see instead a gaze wide with wisdom and peace -- eight pounds of unadulterated possibility. Newborns reminded her of tiny Buddhas, faces full of divinity. It didn't last long, though. When Lacy saw these same infants a week later at their regular checkups, they had turned into ordinary -- albeit tiny -- people. That holiness, somehow, disappeared, and Lacy was always left wondering where in this world it might go. While his mother was across town delivering the newest resident of Sterling, New Hampshire, Peter Houghton was waking up. His father knocked on the door on his way out to work -- Peter's alarm clock. Downstairs, a bowl and a box of cereal would be waiting for him -- his mother remembered to do that even when she got paged at two in the morning. There would be a note from her, too, telling him to have a good day at school, as if it were that simple. Peter threw back his covers. He moved to his desk, still wearing his pajama bottoms, sat down, and logged onto the Internet. The words on the message board were blurry. He reached for his glasses -- he kept them next to his computer. After he slipped the frames on, he dropped the case onto the keyboard -- and suddenly, he was seeing something he'd hoped never to see again. Peter reached out and hit CONTROL ALT DELETE, but he could still picture it, even after the screen went blank, even after he closed his eyes, even after he started to cry. *** In a town the size of Sterling, everyone knew everyone else, and always had. In some ways, this was comforting -- like a great big extended family that you sometimes loved and sometimes fell out of favor with. At other times, it haunted Josie: like right now, when she was standing in the cafeteria line behind Natalie Zlenko, a dyke of the first order who, way back in second grade, had invited Josie over to play and had convinced her to pee on the front lawn like a boy. What were you thinking , her mother had said, when she'd come to pick her up and saw them bare-bottomed and squatting over the daffodils. Even now, a decade later, Josie couldn't look at Natalie Zlenko with her buzz cut and her ever-present SLR camera without wondering if Natalie still thought about that, too. On Josie's other side was Courtney Ignatio, the alpha female of Sterling High. With her honey-blond hair hanging over her shoulders like a shawl made of silk and her low-rise jeans mail-ordered from Fred Segal, she'd spawned an entourage of clones. On Courtney's tray was a bottle of water and a banana. On Josie's was a platter of French fries. It was second period, and just like her mother had predicted, she was famished. "Hey," Courtney said, loud enough for Natalie to overhear. "Can you tell the vagitarian to let us pass?" Natalie's cheeks burned with color, and she flattened herself up against the sneeze guard of the salad bar so that Courtney and Josie could slip by. They paid for their food and walked across the cafeteria. Whenever she came into the cafeteria, Josie felt like a naturalist observing different species in their natural, nonacademic habitat. There were the geeks, bent over their textbooks and laughing at math jokes nobody else even wanted to understand. Behind them were the art freaks, who smoked clove cigarettes on the ropes course behind the school and drew manga comics in the margins of their notes. Near the condiment bar were the skanks, who drank black coffee and waited for the bus that would take them to the technical high school three towns over for their afternoon classes; and the druggies, already strung out by nine o'clock in the morning. There were misfits, too -- kids like Natalie and Angela Phlug, fringe friends by default, because nobody else would have them. And then there was Josie's posse. They took over two tables, not because there were so many of them, but because they were larger than life: Emma, Maddie, Haley, John, Brady, Trey, Drew. Josie could remember how, when she started hanging around with this group, she'd get everyone's names confused. They were that interchangeable. They all sort of looked alike, too -- the boys all wearing their maroon home hockey jerseys and their hats backward, bright thatches of hair stuck through the loops at their foreheads like the start of a fire; the girls carbon copies of Courtney, by studious design. Josie slipped inconspicuously into the heart of them, because she looked like Courtney, too. Her tangle of hair had been blown glass-straight; her heels were three inches high, even though there was still snow on the ground. If she appeared the same on the outside, it was that much easier to ignore the fact that she didn't really know how she felt on the inside. "Hey," Maddie said, as Courtney sat down beside her. "Hey." "Did you hear about Fiona Kierland?" Courtney's eyes lit up; gossip was as good a catalyst as any chemical. "The one whose boobs are two different sizes?" "No, that's Fiona the sophomore. I'm talking about Fiona the freshman." "The one who always carries a box of tissues for her allergies?" Josie said, sliding into a seat. "Or not," Haley said. "Guess who got sent to rehab for snorting coke." "Get out ." "That's not even the whole scandal," Emma added. "Her dealer was the head of the Bible study group that meets after school." "Oh my God !" Courtney said. " Exactly ." "Hey." Matt slipped into the chair beside Josie. "What took you so long?" She turned to him. At this end of the table, the guys were rolling straw wrappers into spitballs and talking about the end of spring skiing. "How long do you think the half-pipe will stay open at Sunapee?" John asked, lobbing a spitball toward a kid one table away who had fallen asleep. The boy had been in Josie's Sign Language elective last year. Like her, he was a junior. His arms and legs were skinny and white and splayed like a stickbug; his mouth, as he snored, was wide-open. "You missed, loser," Drew said. "If Sunapee closes, Killington's still good. They have snow until, like, August." His spitball landed in the boy's hair. Derek . The kid's name was Derek. Matt glanced at Josie's French fries. "You're not going to eat those , are you?" "I'm starving." He pinched the side of her waist, a caliper and a criticism all at once. Josie looked down at the fries. Ten seconds ago, they'd looked golden brown and smelled like heaven; now all she could see was the grease that stained the paper plate. Matt took a handful and passed the rest to Drew, who threw a spitball that landed in the sleeping boy's mouth. With a choke and a sputter, Derek startled awake. "Sweet!" Drew high-fived John. Derek spat into a napkin and rubbed his mouth hard. He glanced around to see who else had been watching. Josie suddenly remembered a sign from her ASL elective, almost all of which she'd forgotten the moment she'd taken the final. A closed fist moved in a circle over the heart meant I'm sorry. Matt leaned over and kissed her neck. "Let's get out of here." He drew Josie to her feet and then turned to his friends. "Later," he said. The gymnasium at Sterling High School was on the second floor, above what would have been a swimming pool if the bond issue had passed when the school was in its planning stages, and what instead became three classrooms that continually resounded with the pounding of sneakered feet and bouncing basketballs. Michael Beach and his best friend, Justin Friedman, two freshmen, sat on the sidelines of the basketball court while their Phys Ed teacher went over the mechanics of dribbling for the hundredth time. It was a wasted exercise -- kids in this class were either like Noah James, already an expert, or like Michael and Justin, who were fluent in Elvish but defined home run as what you did after school in order to avoid getting hung up on coat hooks by your underwear. They sat cross-legged and knob-kneed, listening to the rodent's squeak of Coach Spears's white sneakers as he hustled from one end of the court to the other. "Ten bucks says I get picked last for a team," Justin murmured. "I wish we could get out of class," Michael commiserated. "Maybe there'll be a fire drill." Justin grinned. "An earthquake." "A monsoon." "Locusts!" "A terrorist attack!" Two sneakers stopped in front of them. Coach Spears glared down, his arms folded. "You two want to tell me what's so funny about basketball?" Michael glanced at Justin, then up at the coach. "Absolutely nothing," he said. After showering, Lacy Houghton made herself a mug of green tea and wandered peacefully through her house. When the kids had been tiny and she'd been overwhelmed by work and life, Lewis would ask her what he could do to make things better. It had been a great irony for her, given Lewis's job. A professor at Sterling College, his specialty was the economics of happiness. Yes, it was a real field of study, and yes, he was an expert. He'd taught seminars and written articles and had been interviewed on CNN about measuring the effects of pleasure and good fortune on a monetary scale -- and yet he'd been at a loss when it came to figuring out what Lacy would enjoy. Did she want to go out to a nice dinner? Get a pedicure? Take a nap? When she told him what she craved, though, he could not comprehend. She'd wanted to be in her own house, with nobody else in it, and nothing pressing to do. She opened the door to Peter's room and set her mug on the dresser so that she could make his bed. What's the point , Peter would say when she dogged him to do it himself. I just have to mess it up again in a few hours . For the most part, she didn't enter Peter's room unless he was in it. Maybe that was why, at first, she felt there was something wrong about the space, as if an integral part were missing. At first she assumed that it was Peter's absence that made the room seem a little empty, then she realized that the computer -- a steady hum, an ever-ready green screen -- had been turned off. She tugged the sheets up and tucked in the edges; she drew the quilt over them and fluffed the pillows. At the threshold of Peter's bedroom she paused and smiled: the room looked perfect. Zoe Patterson was wondering what it was like to kiss a guy who had braces. Not that it was a remote possibility for her anytime in the near future, but she figured it was something she ought to consider before the moment actually caught her off guard. In fact, she wondered what it would be like to kiss a guy, period -- even one who wasn't orthodontically challenged, like her. And honestly, was there any place better than a stupid math class to let your mind wander? Mr. McCabe, who thought he was the Chris Rock of algebra, was doing his daily stand-up routine. "So, two kids are in the lunch line, when the first kid turns to his friend and says, 'I have no money! What should I do?' And his buddy says, '2x + 5!'" Zoe looked up at the clock. She counted along with the second hand until it was 9:50 on the dot and then popped out of her seat to hand Mr. McCabe a pass. "Ah, orthodontia," he read out loud. "Well, make sure he doesn't wire your mouth shut, Ms. Patterson. So, the buddy says, '2x + 5.' A binomial. Get it? Buy-no-meal ?!" Zoe hefted her backpack onto her shoulders and walked out of the classroom. She had to meet her mom in front of the school at ten o'clock -- parking was killer, so it would be a drive-by pickup. Mid-class, the halls were hollow and resonant; it felt like trudging through the belly of a whale. Zoe detoured into the main office to sign out on the secretary's clipboard, and then nearly mowed down a kid in her hurry to get outside. It was warm enough to unzip her jacket and think of summer and soccer camp and what it would be like when her palate expander was finally removed. If you kissed a guy who didn't have braces, and you pressed too hard, could you cut his gums? Something told Zoe that if you made a guy bleed, you probably wouldn't be hooking up with him again. What if he had braces, too, like that blond kid from Chicago who'd just transferred and sat in front of her in English (not that she liked him or anything, although he had turned around to hand her back her homework paper and held on to it just a smidgen too long...)? Would they get stuck together like jammed gears and have to be taken to the emergency room at the hospital, and how totally humiliating would that be? Zoe ran her tongue along the ragged metal fence posts in her mouth. Maybe she could temporarily join a convent. She sighed and peered down the block to see whether she could make out her mom's green Explorer from the conga line of passing cars. And just about then, something exploded. Patrick sat at a red light in his unmarked police car, waiting to turn onto the highway. Beside him, on the passenger seat, was a paper bag with a vial of cocaine inside it. The dealer they'd busted at the high school had admitted it was cocaine, and yet Patrick had to waste half his day taking it to the state lab so that someone in a white coat could tell him what he already knew. He fiddled with the volume button of the dispatch radio just in time to hear the fire department being sent to the high school for an explosion. Probably the boiler; the school was old enough for its internal structure to be falling apart. He tried to remember where the boiler was located in Sterling High, and wondered if they'd be lucky enough to come out of that kind of situation without anyone being hurt. Shots fired ... The light turned green, but Patrick didn't move. The discharge of a gun in Sterling was rare enough to have him narrow his attention to the voice on the dispatch radio, waiting for an explanation. At the high school ... Sterling High ... The dispatcher's voice was getting faster, more intense. Patrick wheeled the car in a U-turn and started toward the school with his lights flashing. Other voices began to transmit in static bursts: officers stating their positions in town; the on-duty supervisor trying to coordinate manpower and calling for mutual aid from Hanover and Lebanon. Their voices knotted and tangled, blocking one another so that everything and nothing was being said at once. Signal 1000 , the dispatcher said. Signal 1000 . In Patrick's entire career as a detective, he'd only heard that call twice. Once was in Maine, when a deadbeat dad had taken an officer hostage. Once was in Sterling, during a potential bank robbery that turned out to be a false alarm. Signal 1000 meant that everyone, immediately, was to get off the radio and leave it free for dispatch. It meant that what they were dealing with was not routine police business. It meant life or death. Chaos was a constellation of students, running out of the school and trampling the injured. A boy holding a handmade sign in an upstairs window that read HELP US. Two girls hugging each other and sobbing. Chaos was blood melting pink on the snow; it was the drip of parents that turned into a stream and then a raging river, screaming out the names of their missing children. Chaos was a TV camera in your face, not enough ambulances, not enough officers, and no plan for how to react when the world as you knew it went to pieces. Patrick pulled halfway onto the sidewalk and grabbed his bulletproof vest from the back of the car. Already, adrenaline pulsed through him, making the edges of his vision swim and his senses more acute. He found Chief O'Rourke standing with a megaphone in the middle of the melee. "We don't know what we're dealing with yet," the chief said. "SOU's on its way." Patrick didn't give a damn about the Special Operations Unit. By the time the SWAT team got here, a hundred more shots might be fired; a kid might be killed. He drew his gun. "I'm going in." "The hell you are. That's not protocol." "There is no fucking protocol for this," Patrick snapped. "You can fire me later." As he raced up the steps to the school, he was vaguely aware of two other patrol officers bucking the chief's commands and joining him in the fray. Patrick directed them each down a different hallway, and then he himself pushed through the double doors, past students who were shoving each other in an effort to get outside. Fire alarms blared so loudly that Patrick had to strain to hear the gunshots. He grabbed the coat of a boy streaking past him. "Who is it?" he yelled. "Who's shooting?" The kid shook his head, speechless, and wrenched away. Patrick watched him run crazily down the hallway, open the door, burst into a rectangle of sunlight. Students funneled around him, as if he were a stone in a river. Smoke billowed and burned his eyes. Patrick heard another staccato of gunshots, and had to restrain himself from running toward them blindly. "How many of them?" he cried as a girl ran by. "I...I don't know..." The boy beside her turned around and looked at Patrick, torn between offering knowledge and getting the hell out of there. "It's a kid...he's shooting everyone..." That was enough. Patrick pushed against the tide, a salmon swimming upstream. Homework papers were scattered on the floor; shell casings rolled beneath the heels of his shoes. Ceiling tiles had been shot off, and a fine gray dust coated the broken bodies that lay twisted on the floor. Patrick ignored all of this, going against most of his training -- running past doors that might hide a perp, disregarding rooms that should have been searched -- instead driving forward with his weapon drawn and his heart beating through every inch of his skin. Later, he would remember other sights that he didn't have time to register right away: the heating duct covers that had been pried loose so that students could hide in the crawl space; the shoes left behind by kids who literally ran out of them; the eerie prescience of crime-scene outlines on the floor outside the biology classrooms, where students had been tracing their own bodies on butcher paper for an assignment. He ran through hallways that seemed to circle in on each other. " Where ?" he would bite out every time he passed a fleeing student -- his only tool of navigation. He'd see sprays of blood, and students crumpled on the ground, and he did not let himself look twice. He pounded up the main stairwell, and just as he reached the top, a door cracked open. Patrick whirled, pointing his gun, as a young female teacher fell to her knees with her hands raised. Behind the white oval of her face were twelve others, featureless and frightened. Patrick could smell urine. He lowered his gun and beckoned her toward the staircase. "Go," he commanded, but he did not stay long enough to see if they did. Turning a corner, Patrick slipped on blood and heard another gunshot, this one loud enough to ring his ears. He swept into the open double doors of the gymnasium and scanned the handful of sprawled bodies, the basketball cart overturned and the globes resting against the far wall -- but no shooter. He knew, from the overtime detail he'd taken on Friday nights to monitor high school ball games, that he'd reached the far end of Sterling High. Which meant that the shooter was either hiding somewhere here or had doubled back past him when Patrick hadn't noticed...and could even now have cornered him in this gym. Patrick spun around to the entrance again to see if that was the case, and then heard another shot. He ran to a door that led out from the gym, one he hadn't noticed in his first quick visual sweep of the area. It was a locker room, tiled white on the walls and the floor. He glanced down, saw the fanned spray of blood at his feet, and edged his gun around the corner wall. Two bodies lay unmoving at one end of the locker room. At the other, closer to Patrick, a slight boy crouched beside a bank of lockers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, crooked on his thin face. He was shivering hard. "Are you okay?" Patrick whispered. He did not want to speak out loud and give away his position to the shooter. The boy only blinked at him. "Where is he?" Patrick mouthed. The boy pulled a pistol from beneath his thigh and held it up to his own head. A new rush of heat surged through Patrick. "Don't fucking move," he shouted, drawing a bead on the boy. "Drop the gun or I will shoot you." Sweat broke out down his back and on his forehead, and he could feel his cupped hands shifting on the butt of the gun as he aimed, determined to lace the kid with bullets if he had to. Patrick let his forefinger brush gently against the trigger just as the boy opened his fingers wide as a starfish. The pistol fell to the floor, skittering across the tile. Immediately, he pounced. One of the other officers -- whom Patrick hadn't even noticed following him -- retrieved the boy's weapon. Patrick dropped the kid onto his stomach and cuffed him, pressing his knee hard into the boy's spine. "Are you alone? Who's with you?" "Just me," the boy ground out. Patrick's head was spinning and his pulse was a military tattoo, but he could vaguely hear the other officer calling this information in over the radio: " Sterling, we have one in custody; we don't have knowledge of anyone else ." Just as seamlessly as it had started, it was over -- at least as much as something like this could be considered over. Patrick didn't know if there were booby traps or bombs in the school; he didn't know how many casualties there were; he didn't know how many wounded Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Alice Peck Day Hospital could take; he didn't know how to go about processing a crime scene this massive. The target had been taken out, but at what irreplaceable cost? Patrick's entire body began to shake, knowing that for so many students and parents and citizens today, he had once again been too late. He took a few steps and sank down to his knees, mostly because his legs simply gave out from underneath them, and pretended that this was intentional, that he wanted to check out the two bodies at the other end of the room. He was vaguely aware of the shooter being pushed out of the locker room by the other officer, to a waiting cruiser downstairs. He didn't turn to watch the kid go; instead he focused on the body directly in front of him. A boy, dressed in a hockey jersey. There was a puddle of blood underneath his side, and a gunshot wound through his forehead. Patrick reached out for a baseball cap that had fallen a few feet away, with the words STERLING HOCKEY embroidered across it. He turned the brim around in his hands, an imperfect circle. The girl lying next to him was facedown, blood spreading from beneath her temple. She was barefoot, and on her toenails was bright pink polish -- just like the stuff Tara had put on Patrick. It made his heart catch. This girl, just like his goddaughter and her brother and a million other kids in this country, had gotten up today and gone to school never imagining she would be in danger. She trusted all the grown-ups and teachers and principals to keep her safe. It was why these schools, post-9/11, had teachers wearing ID all the time and doors locked during the day -- the enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was sitting right next to you. Suddenly, the girl shifted. " Help ... me ..." Patrick knelt beside her. "I'm here," he said, his touch gentle as he assessed her condition. "Everything's all right." He turned her enough to see that the blood was coming from a cut on her scalp, not a gunshot wound, as he'd assumed. He ran his hands over her limbs. He kept murmuring to her, words that did not always make sense, but that let her know that she wasn't alone anymore. "What's your name, sweetheart?" "Josie..." The girl started to thrash, trying to sit up. Patrick put the bulk of his body strategically between her and the boy's -- she'd be in shock already; he didn't need her to go over the edge. She touched her hand to her forehead, and when it came away oily with blood, she panicked. "What... happened ?" He should have stayed there and waited for the medics to come get her. He should have radioed for help. But should hardly seemed to apply anymore, and so Patrick lifted Josie into his arms. He carried her out of the locker room where she'd nearly been killed, hurried down the stairs, and pushed through the front door of the school, as if he might be able to save them both. Copyright © Jodi Picoult, 2007 Continues... Excerpted from Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult Copyright ©2008 by Jodi Picoult. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

The Little House (9 Volumes Set)

From the Back Cover The set includes: Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years. Little House in the Big Woods Wolves and panthers and bears roam the deep Wisconsin woods in the late 1870's. In those same woods, Laura lives with Pa and Ma, and her sisters, Mary and Baby Carrie, in a snug little house built of logs. Pa hunts and traps. Ma makes her own cheese and butter. All night long, the wind howls lonesomely, but Pa plays the fiddle and sings, keeping the family safe and cozy. Little House on the Prairie Pa Ingalls decides to sell the little log house, and the family sets out for Indian country! They travel from Wisconsin to Kansas, and there, finally, Pa builds their little house on the prairie. Sometimes farm life is difficult, even dangerous, but Laura and her family are kept busy and are happy with the promise of their new life on the prairie. Farmer Boy While Laura Ingalls grows up in a little house on the western prairie, Almanzo Wilder is living on a big farm in New York State. Almanzo and his brother and sisters work at their chores from dawn to supper most days -- no matter what the weather. There is still time for fun, though, especially with the horses, which Almanzo loves more than anything. On the Banks of Plum Creek Laura's family's first home in Minnesota is made of sod, but Pa builds a clean new house made of sawed lumber beside Plum Creek. The money for materials will come from their first wheat crop. Then, just before the wheat is ready to harvest, a strange glittering cloud fills the sky, blocking out the sun. Soon millions of grasshoppers cover the field and everything on the farm. In a week's time, there is no wheat crop left at all. By the Shores of Silver Lake Pa Ingalls heads west to the unsettled wilderness of the Dakota Territory. When Ma, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and baby Grace join him, they become the first settlers in the town of De Smet. And Pa begins work on the first building in what will soon be a brand-new town on the shores of Silver Lake. The Long Winter The first terrible storm comes to the barren prairie in October. Then it snows almost without stopping until April. Snow has reached the rooftops, and no trains can get through with food or coal. The people of De Smet are starving, including Laura's family, who wonder how they're going to make it through this terrible winter. It is young Almanzo Wilder who finally understands what needs to be done. He must save the town, even if it means risking his own life. Little Town on the Prairie The long winter is over. With spring come socials, parties, and "Literaries." There is also work to be done. Laura spends many hours each day sewing shirts to help send Mary to a college for the blind. But in the evenings, Laura makes time for a new caller, Almanzo Wilder. These Happy Golden Years Laura is teaching school, and it's terrifying! Most of the students are taller than she is, and she must sleep away from home for the first time. Laura is miserable, but the money is needed to keep Mary in a college for the blind. And every Friday -- no matter what the weather -- Almanzo Wilder arrives to take Laura home to her family for the weekend. Laura and Almanzo are courting, and even though she's not yet sixteen, she knows that this is a time for new beginnings. The First Four Years Laura and Almanzo Wilder have just been married! Their life on a small prairie homestead begins with high hopes. But each year seems to bring unexpected disasters -- storms, sickness, fire, and unpaid debts. These first four years call for courage, strength, and a great deal of determination. Always, though, there is love, especially for the newest member of the family -- baby Rose. About the Author Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) was born in a log cabin in the Wisconsin woods. With her family, she pioneered throughout America’s heartland during the 1870s and 1880s, finally settling in Dakota Territory. She married Almanzo Wilder in 1885; their only daughter, Rose, was born the following year. The Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm at Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where they established a permanent home. After years of farming, Laura wrote the first of her beloved Little House books in 1932. The nine Little House books are international classics. Her writings live on into the twenty-first century as America’s quintessential pioneer story. Garth Williams is the renowned illustrator of almost one hundred books for children, including the beloved Stuart Little by E. B. White, Bedtime for Frances by Russell Hoban, and the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. He was born in 1912 in New York City but raised in England. He founded an art school near London and served with the British Red Cross Civilian Defense during World War II. Williams worked as a portrait sculptor, art director, and magazine artist before doing his first book Stuart Little , thus beginning a long and lustrous career illustrating some of the best known children's books. In addition to illustrating works by White and Wilder, he also illustrated George Selden’s The Cricket in Times Square and its sequels (Farrar Straus Giroux). He created the character and pictures for the first book in the Frances series by Russell Hoban (HarperCollins) and the first books in the Miss Bianca series by Margery Sharp (Little, Brown). He collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown on her Little Golden Books titles Home for a Bunny and Little Fur Family, among others, and with Jack Prelutsky on two poetry collections published by Greenwillow: Ride a Purple Pelican and Beneath a Blue Umbrella . He also wrote and illustrated seven books on his own, including Baby Farm Animals (Little Golden Books) and The Rabbits’ Wedding (HarperCollins).

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)

Review "This is a gem of a book....may be [Sherman Alexie's] best work yet."― New York Times "A Native American equivalent of Angela's Ashes ."― (starred review) , Publishers Weekly "Sure to resonate and lift spirits of all ages for years to come."― USA Today "Realistic and fantastical and funny and tragic-all at the same time."― (starred review) , VOYA "The line between dramatic monologue, verse novel, and standup comedy gets unequivocally-and hilariously and triumphantly-bent in this novel."― (starred review) , Horn Book "Nimbly blends sharp with unapologetic emotion....fluid narration deftly mingles raw feelings with funny, sardonic insight."― Kirkus Reviews , (starred review) "Few writers are more masterful than Sherman Alexie."― Los Angeles Times "Alexie's humor and prose are easygoing and well suited to his young audience."― Booklist "Fierce observations and sharp sense of humor...hilarious language."― Newsday "Breathtakingly honest, funny, profane, sad....will stay with readers."― (starred review) , KLIATT "What emerges most strongly is Junior's uncompromising determination to press on while leaving nothing important behind."― (starred review) , BCCB "[Alexie] has created an endearing teen protagonist in his own likeness and placed him in the here and now."― Minneapolis Star Tribune "Deftly taps into the human desire to stand out while fitting in."― BookPage "Exceptionally good....Arnold is a wonderful character."― Miami Herald About the Author A National Book Award-winning author, poet, and filmmaker, Sherman Alexie is one of the most well-known and beloved literary writers of his generation. His works of fiction, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , Reservation Blues , and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven , have received numerous awards and citations. He lives in Seattle. Like Thunder Boy Jr., Sherman was named for his father.

Anne of Green Gables, Complete 8-Book Box Set

Amazon.com Review When Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, send for a boy orphan to help them out at the farm, they are in no way prepared for the error that will change their lives. The mistake takes the shape of Anne Shirley, a redheaded 11-year-old girl who can talk anyone under the table. Fortunately, her sunny nature and quirky imagination quickly win over her reluctant foster parents. Anne's feisty spirit soon draws many friends--and much trouble--her way. Not a day goes by without some melodramatic new episode in the tragicomedy of her life. Early on, Anne declares her eternal antipathy for Gilbert Blythe, a classmate who commits the ultimate sin of mocking her hair color. Later, she accidentally dyes that same cursed hair green. Another time, in her haste to impress a new neighbor, she bakes a cake with liniment instead of vanilla. Lucy Maud Montgomery's series of books about Anne have remained classics since the early 20th century. Her portrayal of this feminine yet independent spirit has given generations of girls a strong female role model, while offering a taste of another, milder time in history. This lovely boxed gift collection comprises Anne of Green Gables , Anne of the Island , Anne of Avonlea , Anne of Windy Poplars , Anne's House of Dreams , Anne of Ingleside , Rainbow Valley , and Rilla of Ingleside . (Ages 9 to 12) --Emilie Coulter Review "Anne…epitomises everything I hope to be: someone who takes joy in the world around her, and, with her fantasies (though up in her red head) shares that joy around her." -- The Guardian "Exquisite in both story and sentence, the Anne books built me as a reader, which is to say: they built me." -- Los Angeles Review of Books About the Author L. M. Montgomery was born in 1874 on Prince Edward Island in Canada, the setting of 19 of her 20 novels. Included among these books are her beloved Anne of Green Gables series and a number of other novels and short story collections. She died in Toronto in 1942. Read more

All the Light We Cannot See

Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: Does the world need yet another novel about WWII? It does when the novel is as inventive and beautiful as this one by Anthony Doerr. In fact, All the Light We Cannot See --while set mostly in Germany and France before and during the war--is not really a “war novel”. Yes, there is fear and fighting and disappearance and death, but the author’s focus is on the interior lives of his two characters. Marie Laure is a blind 14-year-old French girl who flees to the countryside when her father disappears from Nazi-occupied Paris. Werner is a gadget-obsessed German orphan whose skills admit him to a brutal branch of Hitler Youth. Never mind that their paths don’t cross until very late in the novel, this is not a book you read for plot (although there is a wonderful, mysterious subplot about a stolen gem). This is a book you read for the beauty of Doerr’s writing-- “Abyss in her gut, desert in her throat, Marie-Laure takes one of the cans of food…”--and for the way he understands and cherishes the magical obsessions of childhood. Marie Laure and Werner are never quaint or twee. Instead they are powerful examples of the way average people in trying times must decide daily between morality and survival. --Sara Nelson From Booklist *Starred Review* A novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr’s magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. It rests, historically, during the occupation of France during WWII, but brief chapters told in alternating voices give the overall—and long—narrative a swift movement through time and events. We have two main characters, each one on opposite sides in the conflagration that is destroying Europe. Marie-Louise is a sightless girl who lived with her father in Paris before the occupation; he was a master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History. When German forces necessitate abandonment of the city, Marie-Louise’s father, taking with him the museum’s greatest treasure, removes himself and his daughter and eventually arrives at his uncle’s house in the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Young German soldier Werner is sent to Saint-Malo to track Resistance activity there, and eventually, and inevitably, Marie-Louise’s and Werner’s paths cross. It is through their individual and intertwined tales that Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.High-Demand Backstory: A multipronged marketing campaign will make the author’s many fans aware of his newest book, and extensive review coverage is bound to enlist many new fans. --Brad Hooper Review “Exquisite…Mesmerizing…Nothing short of brilliant.” -- Alice Evans ― Portland Oregonian “Hauntingly beautiful.” -- Janet Maslin ― The New York Times “History intertwines with irresistible fiction—secret radio broadcasts, a cursed diamond, a soldier’s deepest doubts—into a richly compelling, bittersweet package.” -- Mary Pols ― People (3 1/2 stars) “Anthony Doerr again takes language beyond mortal limits.” -- Elissa Schappell ― Vanity Fair “The whole enthralls.” ― Good Housekeeping “Enthrallingly told, beautifully written…Every piece of back story reveals information that charges the emerging narrative with significance, until at last the puzzle-box of the plot slides open to reveal the treasure hidden inside.” -- Amanda Vaill ― Washington Post “Stupendous…A beautiful, daring, heartbreaking, oddly joyous novel.” -- David Laskin ― The Seattle Times “Stunning and ultimately uplifting… Doerr’s not-to-be-missed tale is a testament to the buoyancy of our dreams, carrying us into the light through the darkest nights.” ― Entertainment Weekly “Doerr has packed each of his scenes with such refractory material that All the Light We Cannot See reflects a dazzling array of themes….Startlingly fresh.” -- John Freeman ― The Boston Globe “Gorgeous… moves with the pace of a thriller… Doerr imagines the unseen grace, the unseen light that, occasionally, surprisingly, breaks to the surface even in the worst of times.” -- Dan Cryer ― San Francisco Chronicle “Incandescent… a luminous work of strife and transcendence… with characters as noble as they are enthralling” -- Hamilton Cain ― O, the Oprah magazine “Perfectly captured…Doerr writes sentences that are clear-eyed, taut, sweetly lyrical.” -- Josh Cook ― Minneapolis Star Tribune “A beautiful, expansive tale…Ambitious and majestic.” -- Steph Cha ― Los Angeles Times “This tough-to-put-down book proves its worth page after lyrical page…Each and every person in this finely spun assemblage is distinct and true.” -- Sharon Peters ― USA Today “Doerr is an exquisite stylist; his talents are on full display.” -- Alan Cheuse ― NPR “Vivid…[ All the Light We Cannot See ] brims with scrupulous reverence for all forms of life. The invisible light of the title shines long after the last page.” -- Tricia Springstubb ― Cleveland Plain Dealer “Intricate… A meditation on fate, free will, and the way that, in wartime, small choices can have vast consequences.” ― New Yorker “Doerr deftly guides All the Light We Cannot See toward the day Werner’s and Marie-Laure lives intersect during the bombing of Saint-Malo in what may be his best work to date.” -- Yvonne Zipp ― Christian Science Monitor “To open a book by Anthony Doerr is to open a door on humanity…His sentences shimmer…His paragraphs are luminous with bright, sparkling beauty.” -- Martha Anne Toll ― Washington Independent Review of Books “Endlessly bold and equally delicate…An intricate miracle of invention, narrative verve, and deep research lightly held, but above all a miracle of humanity….Anthony Doerr’s novel celebrates—and also accomplishes—what only the finest art can: the power to create, reveal, and augment experience in all its horror and wonder, heartbreak and rapture.” ― Shelf Awareness “Magnificent.” -- Carmen Callil ― The Guardian (UK) “Intricately structured… All the Light We Cannot See is a work of art and of preservation.” -- Jane Ciabattari ― BBC “A revelation.” -- Michael Magras ― BookReporter.com “Anthony Doerr writes beautifully… A tour de force.” -- Elizabeth Reed ― Deseret Morning News “A novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr’s magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. . . . Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably recreates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.” ― Booklist (starred review) “Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.” ― Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “If a book’s success can be measured by its ability to move readers and the number of memorable characters it has, Story Prize-winner Doerr’s novel triumphs on both counts. He convinces readers...that war—despite its desperation, cruelty, and harrowing moral choices—cannot negate the pleasures of the world.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) “This novel has the physical and emotional heft of a masterpiece…[All the Light We Cannot See] presents two characters so interesting and sympathetic that readers will keep turning the pages hoping for an impossibly happy ending…Highly recommended for fans of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” -- Evelyn Beck ― Library Journal (starred review) "What a delight! This novel has exquisite writing and a wonderfully suspenseful story. A book you'll tell your friends about..." -- Frances Itani, author of Deafening“This jewel of a story is put together like a vintage timepiece, its many threads coming together so perfectly. Doerr’s writing and imagery are stunning. It’s been a while since a novel had me under its spell in this fashion. The story still lives on in my head.” -- Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone“ All the Light We Cannot See is a dazzling, epic work of fiction. Anthony Doerr writes beautifully about the mythic and the intimate, about snails on beaches and armies on the move, about fate and love and history and those breathless, unbearable moments when they all come crashing together.” -- Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins“Doerr sees the world as a scientist, but feels it as a poet. He knows about everything —radios, diamonds, mollusks, birds, flowers, locks, guns—but he also writes a line so beautiful, creates an image or scene so haunting, it makes you think forever differently about the big things—love, fear, cruelty, kindness, the countless facets of the human heart. Wildly suspenseful, structurally daring, rich in detail and soul, Doerr’s new novel is that novel, the one you savor, and ponder, and happily lose sleep over, then go around urging all your friends to read—now.” -- J.R. Moehringer, author of Sutton and The Tender Bar“A tender exploration of this world's paradoxes; the beauty of the laws of nature and the terrible ends to which war subverts them; the frailty and the resilience of the human heart; the immutability of a moment and the healing power of time. The language is as expertly crafted as the master locksmith's models in the story, and the settings as intricately evoked. A compelling and uplifting novel.” -- M.L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans“The craftsmanship of Doerr’s book is rooted in his ability to inhabit the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner…[A] fine novel.” -- Steve Novak ― Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “Beautifully written… Soulful and addictive.” -- Chris Stuckenschneider ― The Missourian “Doerr conjures up a vibrating, crackling world…Intricately, beautifully crafted.” -- Rebecca Kelley ― Bustle.com “There is so much in this book. It is difficult to convey the complexity, the detail, the beauty and the brutality of this simple story.” -- Carole O'Brien ― Aspen Daily News “Sometimes a novel doesn’t merely transport. It immerses, engulfs, keeps you caught within its words until the very end, when you blink and remember there’s a world beyond the pages. All the Light We Cannot See is such a book… Vibrant, poignant, delicately exquisite. Despite the careful building of time and place (so vivid you fall between the pages), it’s not a story of history; it’s a story of people living history.” ― Historical Novel Society About the Author Anthony Doerr is the author of the New York Times bestselling Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and All the Light We Cannot See , winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector , the novel About Grace , and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome . He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. All the Light We Cannot See Read more

The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel

Review “One of those stories that may earn its place next to Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull , Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist , and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi .” — Portland Oregonian “Splendid.” — People (3 ½ out of 4 stars) “Fans of Marley & Me , rejoice.” — Entertainment Weekly “The perfect book for anyone who knows that some of our best friends walk beside us on four legs; that compassion isn’t only for humans; and that the relationship between two souls...meant for each other never really comes to an end.” — Jodi Picoult “ The Art of Racing in The Rain has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger, and—most especially—the canine narrator Enzo. This old soul of a dog has much to teach us about being human. I loved this book.” — Sara Gruen, Author of Water for Elephants “The Art of Racing in The Rain has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger, and--most especially--the canine narrator Enzo. This old soul of a dog has much to teach us about being human.” — Sara Gruen, Author of Water for Elephants “I savored Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain for many reasons: a dog who speaks, the thrill of competitive racing, a heart-tugging storyline, and--best of all--the fact that it is a meditation on humility and hope in the face of despair.” — Wally Lamb, Author of She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True From the Back Cover A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope—a captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it. About the Author Garth Stein is the author of Enzo Races in the Rain! , based on the New York Times bestselling novel The Art of Racing in the Rain (and its tween adaptation, Racing in the Rain ). His other works include A Sudden Light , How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets , Raven Stole the Moon , and a play, Brother Jones . He is the cofounder of Seattle7Writers.org, a nonprofit collective of sixty-two Northwest authors dedicated to fostering a passion for the written word. Garth lives in Seattle with his family and his dog, Comet. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Art of Racing in the Rain A Novel By HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. ISBN: 9780061537967 Chapter One Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences. And that's why I'm here now waiting for Denny to come home—he should be here soon—lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine. I'm old. And while I'm very capable of getting older, that's not the way I want to go out. Shot full of pain medication and steroids to reduce the swelling of my joints. Vision fogged with cataracts. Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggie Depends stocked in the pantry. I'm sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I've seen on the streets, the ones that cradle the hindquarters so a dog can drag his ass behind him when things start to fail. That's humiliating and degrading. I'm not sure if it's worse than dressing up a dog for Halloween, but it's close. He would do it out of love, of course. I'm sure he would keep me alive as long as he possibly could, my body deteriorating, disintegrating around me, dissolving until there's nothing left but my brain floating in a glass jar filled with clear liquid, my eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cables and tubes feeding what remains. But I don't want to be kept alive. Because I know what's next. I've seen it on TV. A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places. It was the best thing I've ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain. After the 1993 Grand Prix, the best thing I've ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth: when a dog is finished living his lifetimes as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man. I've always felt almost human. I've always known that there's something about me that's different than other dogs. Sure, I'm stuffed into a dog's body, but that's just the shell. It's what's inside that's important. The soul. And my soul is very human. I am ready to become a man now, though I realize I will lose all that I have been. All of my memories, all of my experiences. I would like to take them with me into my next life—there is so much I have gone through with the Swift family—but I have little say in the matter. What can I do but force myself to remember? Try to imprint what I know on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any kind. Carry it so deeply in the pockets of my existence that when I open my eyes and look down at my new hands with their thumbs that are able to close tightly around their fingers, I will already know. I will already see. The door opens, and I hear him with his familiar cry, "Yo, Zo!" Usually, I can't help but put aside my pain and hoist myself to my feet, wag my tail, sling my tongue around, and shove my face into his crotch. It takes humanlike willpower to hold back on this particular occasion, but I do. I hold back. I don't get up. I'm acting. "Enzo?" I hear his footsteps, the concern in his voice. He finds me and looks down. I lift my head, wag my tail feebly so it taps against the floor. I play the part. He shakes his head and runs his hand through his hair, sets down the plastic bag from the grocery that has his dinner in it. I can smell roast chicken through the plastic. Tonight he's having roast chicken and an iceberg lettuce salad. "Oh, Enz," he says. He reaches down to me, crouches, touches my head like he does, along the crease behind the ear, and I lift my head and lick at his forearm. "What happened, kid?" he asks. Gestures can't explain. "Can you get up?" I try, and I scramble. My heart takes off, lunges ahead because no, I can't. I panic. I thought I was just acting, but I really can't get up. Shit. Life imitating art. "Take it easy, kid," he says, pressing down on my chest to calm me. "I've got you." He lifts me easily, he cradles me, and I can smell the day on him. I can smell everything he's done. His work, the auto shop where he's behind the counter all day, standing, making nice with the customers who yell at him because their BMWs don't work right and it costs too much to fix them and that makes them mad so they have to yell at someone. I can smell his lunch. He went to the Indian buffet he likes. All you can eat. It's cheap, and sometimes he takes a container with him and steals extra portions of the tandoori chicken and yellow rice and has it for dinner, too. I can smell beer. He stopped somewhere. The Mexican restaurant up the hill. I can smell the tortilla chips on his breath. Now it makes sense. Usually, I'm excellent with elapsed time, but I wasn't paying attention because of my emoting. He places me gently in the tub and turns on the handheld shower thing and says, "Easy, Enz." Continues... Excerpted from The Art of Racing in the Rain by Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Yargo

John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962: The Wayward Bus / Burning Bright / Sweet Thursday / The Winter of Our Discontent (Library of America)

About the Author John Steinbeck (1902-1968) is the author of such celebrated works as Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), for which he won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize . He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.The editors of this volume are Robert DeMott and Brian Railsback . Robert DeMott is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University and the author of Steinbeck’s Typewriter , an award-winning book of critical essays. Brian Railsback is dean of the Honors College at Western Carolina University and the author of Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck .

On the Beach

Review “The most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.” — The New York Times “The most shocking fiction I have read in years. What is shocking about it is both the idea and the sheer imaginative brilliance with which Mr. Shute brings it off.”  — San Francisco Chronicle “A novelist of intelligent and engaging quality, deservedly popular. . . . Nevil Shute was, in brief, the sort of novelist who genuinely touches the imagination and feeling.” — The Times (London) About the Author Nevil Shute Norway was born in 1899 in Ealing, London. He studied Engineering Science at Balliol College, Oxford. Following his childhood passion, he entered the fledgling aircraft industry as an aeronautical engineer working to develop airships and, later, airplanes. In his spare time he began writing and he published his first novel, Marazan , in 1926, using the name Nevil Shute to protect his engineering career. In 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton and they had two daughters. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons. After the war he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death in 1960. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), A Town Like Alice (1950), and On the Beach (1957). Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONELieutenant-Commander Peter Holmes of the Royal Australian Navy woke soon after dawn. He lay drowsily for a while, lulled by the warm comfort of Mary sleeping beside him, watching the first light of the Australian sun upon the cretonne curtains of their room. He knew from the sun's rays that it was about five o'clock: very soon the light would wake his baby daughter Jennifer in her cot, and then they would have to get up and start doing things. No need to start before that happened; he could lie a little longer.He woke happy, and it was some time before his conscious senses realised and pinned down the origin of this happiness. It was not Christmas, because that was over. He had illuminated the little fir tree in their garden with a string of coloured lights with a long lead to the plug beside the fireplace in the lounge, a small replica of the great illuminated tree a mile away outside the Town Hall of Falmouth. They had had a barbecue in the garden on the evening of Christmas Day, with a few friends. Christmas was over, and this-his mind turned over slowly-this must be Thursday the 27th. As he lay in bed the sunburn on his back was still a little sore from their day on the beach yesterday, and from sailing in the race.. He would do well to keep his shirt on today. And then, as consciousness came fully to him, he realised that of course he would keep his shirt on today. He had a date at eleven o'clock in the Second Naval Member's office, in the Navy Department up in Melbourne. It meant a new appointment, his first work for five months. It could even mean a seagoing job if he were very lucky, and he ached for a ship again.It meant work, anyway. The thought of it had made him happy when he went to sleep, and his happiness had lasted through the night. He had had no appointment since he had been promoted lieutenant-commander in August and in the circumstances of the time he had almost given up hope of ever working again. The Navy Department, however, had maintained him on full pay throughout these months, and he was grateful to them.The baby stirred, and started chuntering and making little whimpering noises. The naval officer reached out and turned the switch of the electric kettle on the tray of tea things and baby food beside the bed, and Mary stirred beside him. She asked the time, and he told her. Then he kissed her, and said, "It's a lovely morning again."She sat up, brushing back her hair. "I got so burned yesterday. I put some calamine stuff on Jennifer last night, but I really don't think she ought to go down to the beach again today." Then she, too, recollected. "Oh Peter, it's today you're going up to Melbourne, isn't it ?"He nodded. "I should stay at home, have a day in the shade.""I think I will."He got up and went to the bathroom. When he came back Mary was up, too; the baby was sitting on her pot and Mary was drawing a comb through her hair before the glass. He sat down on the edge of the bed in a horizontal beam of sunlight, and made the tea.She said, "It's going to be very hot in Melbourne today, Peter. I thought we might go down to the club about four, and you join us there for a swim. I could take the trailer and your bathers."They had a small car in the garage, but since the short war had ended a year previously it remained unused. However, Peter Holmes was an ingenious man and good with tools, and he had contrived a tolerable substitute. Both Mary and he had bicycles. He had built a small two-wheeled trailer using the front wheels of two motor bicycles, and he had contrived a trailer hitch on both Mary's bicycle and his own so that either could pull this thing, which served them as a perambulator and a general goods carrier. Their chief trouble was the long hill up from Falmouth.He nodded. "That's not a bad idea. I'll take my bike and leave it at the station.""What train have you got to catch ?""The nine-five." He sipped his tea and glanced at his watch. "I'll go and get the milk as soon as I've drunk this."He put on a pair of shorts and a singlet and went out. He lived in the ground floor flat of an old house upon the hill above the town that had been divided into apartments; he had the garage and a good part of the garden in his share of the property. There was a verandah, and here he kept the bicycles and the trailer. It would have been logical to park the car under the trees and use the garage, but he could not bring himself to do that. The little Morris was the first car he had ever owned, and he had courted Mary in it. They had been married in 1961 six months before the war, before he sailed in H.M.A.S. Anzac for what they thought would be indefinite separation. The short, bewildering war had followed, the war of which no history had been written or ever would be written now, that had flared all round the northern hemisphere and had died away with the last seismic record of explosion on the thirty-seventh day. At the end of the third month he had returned to Williamstown in Anzac on the last of her fuel oil while the statesmen of the southern hemisphere gathered in conference at Wellington in New Zealand to compare notes and assess the new conditions; had returned to Falmouth to his Mary and his Morris Minor car. The car had three gallons in the tank; he used that unheeding, and another five that he bought at a pump, before it dawned upon Australians that all oil came from the northern hemisphere.He pulled the trailer and his bicycle down from the verandah on to the lawn and fitted the trailer hitch; then he mounted and rode off. He had four miles to go to fetch the milk and cream, for the transport shortage now prevented all collections from the farms in his district and they had learned to make their own butter in the Mixmaster. He rode off down the road in the warm morning sunlight, the empty billies rattling in the trailer at his back, happy in the thought of work before him.There was very little traffic on the road. He passed one vehicle that once had been a car, the engine removed and the windscreen knocked out, drawn by an Angus bullock. He passed two riders upon horses, going carefully upon the gravel verge to the road beside the bitumen surface. He did not want one; they were scarce and delicate creatures that changed hands for a thousand pounds or more, but he had sometimes thought about a bullock for Mary. He could convert the Morris easily enough, though it would break his heart to do so.He reached the farm in half an hour, and went straight to the milking shed. He knew the farmer well, a slow speaking, tall, lean man who walked with a limp from the Second World War. He found him in the separator room, where the milk flowed into one churn and the cream into another in a low murmur of sound from the electric motor that drove the machine. "Morning, Mr. Paul," said the naval officer. "How are you today?""Good, Mr. Holmes." The farmer took the milk billy from him and filled it at the vat. "Everything all right with you?""Fine. I've got to go up to Melbourne, to the Navy Department. I think they've got a job for me at last.""Ah," said the farmer, "that'll be good. Kind of wearisome, waiting around, I'd say."Peter nodded. "It's going to complicate things a bit if it's a seagoing job. Mary'll be coming for the milk, though, twice a week. She'll bring the money, just the same."The farmer said, "You don't have to worry about the money till you come back, anyway. I've got more milk than the pigs will take even now, dry as it is. Put twenty gallons in the creek last night-can't get it away. Suppose I ought to raise more pigs, but then it doesn't seem worth while. It's hard to say what to do ..." He stood in silence for a minute, and then he said, "Going to be kind of awkward for the wife, coming over here. What's she going to do with Jennifer?""She'll probably bring her over with her, in the trailer.""Kind of awkward for her, that." The farmer walked to the alley of the milking shed and stood in the warm sunlight, looking the bicycle and trailer over. "That's a good trailer," he said. "As good a little trailer as I ever saw. Made it yourself, didn't you ?" "That's right.""Where did you get the wheels, if I may ask?""They're motor bike wheels. I got them in Elizabeth Street.""Think you could get a pair for me ?""I could try," Peter said. "I think there may be some of them about still. They're better than the little wheels they tow more easily." The farmer nodded. "They may be a bit scarce now. People seem to be hanging on to motor bikes.""I was saying to the wife," the farmer remarked slowly, "if I had a little trailer like that I could make it like a chair for her, put on behind the push bike and take her into Falmouth, shopping. It's mighty lonely for a woman in a place like this, these days," he explained. "Not like it was before the war, when she could take the car and get into town in twenty minutes. The bullock cart takes three and a half hours, and three and a half hours back; that's seven hours for traveling alone. She did try to learn to ride a bike but she'll never make a go of it, not at her age and another baby on the way. I wouldn't want her to try. But if I had a little trailer like you've got I could take her into Falmouth twice a week, and take the milk and cream along to Mrs. Holmes at the same time." He paused. "I'd like to be able to do that for the wife," he remarked. "After all, from what they say on the wireless, there's not so long to go."The naval officer nodded. "I'll scout around a bit today and see what I can find. You don't mind what they cost ?"The farmer shook his head. "So long as they're good wheels, to give no trouble. Good tyres, that's the main thing-last the time out. Like those you've got."The officer nodded. "I'll have a look for some today.""Taking you a good bit out of your way.""I can slip up there by tram. It won't be any trouble. Thank God for the brown coal."The farmer turned to where the separator was still running. "That's right. We'd be in a pretty mess but for the electricity." He slipped an empty churn into the stream of skim milk deftly and pulled the full churn away_ "Tell me, Mr. Holmes," he said. "Don't they use big digging machines to get the coal? Like bulldozers, and things like that?" The officer nodded. "Well, where do they get the oil to run those things ?""I asked about that once," Peter said. "They distil it on the spot, out of the brown coal. It costs about two pounds a gallon.""You don't say!" The farmer stood in thought. "I was thinking may be if they could do that for themselves, they might do some for us. But at that price, it wouldn't hardly be practical ..."Peter took the milk and cream billies, put them in the trailer, and set off for home. It was six-thirty when he got back. He had a shower and dressed in the uniform he had so seldom worn since his promotion, accelerated his breakfast, and rode his bicycle down the hill to catch the 8. 15 in order that he might explore the motor dealers for the wheels before his appointment.He left his bicycle at the garage that had serviced his small car in bygone days. It serviced no cars now. Horses stood stabled where the cars had been, the horses of the business men who lived outside the town, who now rode in in jodhpurs and plastic coats to stable their horses while they commuted up to town in the electric train. The petrol pumps served them as hitching posts. In the evening they would come down on the train, saddle their horses, strap the attache case to the saddle, and ride home again. The tempo of business life was slowing down and this was a help to them; the 5.3 express train from the city had been cancelled and a 4. I 7 put on to replace it.Peter Holmes travelled to the city immersed in speculations about his new appointment, for the paper famine had closed down all the daily newspapers and news now came by radio alone. The Royal Australian Navy was a very small fleet now. Seven small ships had been converted from oil burners to most unsatisfactory coal burners at great cost and effort; an attempt to convert the aircraft carrier Melbourne had been suspended when it proved that she would be too slow to allow the aircraft to land on with safety except in the strongest wind. Moreover, stocks of aviation fuel had to be husbanded so carefully that training programmes had been reduced to virtually nil, so that it now seemed inexpedient to carry on the Fleet Air Arm at all. He had not heard of any changes in the officers of the seven minesweepers and frigates that remained in commission. It might be that somebody was sick and had to be replaced, or it might be that they had decided to rotate employed officers with the unemployed to keep up seagoing experience. More probably it meant a posting to some dreary job on shore, an office job in the Barracks or doing something with the stores at some disconsolate, deserted place like Flinders Naval Depot. He would be deeply disappointed if he did not get to sea, and yet he knew it would be better for him so. On shore he could look after Mary and the baby as he had been doing, and there was now not so long to go.He got to the city in about an hour and went out of the station to get upon the tram. It rattled unobstructed through streets innocent of other vehicles and took him quickly to the motor dealing district. Most of the shops here were closed or taken over by the few that remained open, the windows still encumbered with the useless stock. He shopped around here for a time, searching for two light wheels in good condition that would make a pair, and finally bought wheels of the same size from two makes of motor cycle, which would make complications with the axle that could be got over by the one mechanic still left in his garage. Read more

Never Let Me Go

Review ONE OF THE ATLANTIC' S 15 BOOKS YOU WON'T REGRET RE-READING "A page turner and a heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish.” — Time “A Gothic tour de force.... A tight, deftly controlled story.... Just as accomplished [as The Remains of the Day ] and, in a very different way, just as melancholy and alarming.” — The New York Times "Elegaic, deceptively lovely.... As always, Ishiguro pulls you under." — Newsweek “Superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled.... The book’s irresistible power comes from Ishiguro’s matchless ability to expose its dark heart in careful increments.” — Entertainment Weekly From the Back Cover From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date. "From the Hardcover edition. About the Author Kazuo Ishiguro is the 2017 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages. Both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have sold more than 1 million copies, and both were adapted into highly acclaimed films. Ishiguro's other work includes The Buried Giant, Nocturnes, A Pale View of the Hills, and An Artist of the Floating World . Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I’m not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as “agitated,” even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying “calm.” I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful—about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham student—which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. I’ve heard it said enough, so I’m sure you’ve heard it plenty more, and maybe there’s something in it. But I’m not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if I’ll be the last. And anyway, I’ve done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, I’ll have done twelve years of this, and it’s only for the last six they’ve let me choose.And why shouldn’t they? Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I’d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I’d never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember, and so in practice, I haven’t been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you don’t have that deeper link with the donor, and though I’ll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year.Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differences—while they didn’t exactly vanish—seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that we’d grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did. It’s ever since then, I suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham.There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. He’d just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and he must have known he wasn’t going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: “Hailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.” Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he’d grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didn’t want reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham.So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to know, and he’d lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking through. He’d ask me about the big things and the little things. About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes he’d make me say things over and over; things I’d told him only the day before, he’d ask about like I’d never told him. “Did you have a sports pavilion?” “Which guardian was your special favourite?” At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that’s what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they’d really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. That was when I first understood, really understood, just how lucky we’d been—Tommy, Ruth, me, all the rest of us..Driving around the country now, I still see things that will remind me of Hailsham. I might pass the corner of a misty field, or see part of a large house in the distance as I come down the side of a valley, even a particular arrangement of poplar trees up on a hillside, and I’ll think: “Maybe that’s it! I’ve found it! This actually is Hailsham!” Then I see it’s impossible and I go on driving, my thoughts drifting on elsewhere. In particular, there are those pavilions. I spot them all over the country, standing on the far side of playing fields, little white prefab buildings with a row of windows unnaturally high up, tucked almost under the eaves. I think they built a whole lot like that in the fifties and sixties, which is probably when ours was put up. If I drive past one I keep looking over to it for as long as possible, and one day I’ll crash the car like that, but I keep doing it. Not long ago I was driving through an empty stretch of Worcestershire and saw one beside a cricket ground so like ours at Hailsham I actually turned the car and went back for a second look.We loved our sports pavilion, maybe because it reminded us of those sweet little cottages people always had in picture books when we were young. I can remember us back in the Juniors, pleading with guardians to hold the next lesson in the pavilion instead of the usual room. Then by the time we were in Senior 2—when we were twelve, going on thirteen—the pavilion had become the place to hide out with your best friends when you wanted to get away from the rest of Hailsham.The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them bothering each other—in the summer, a third group could hang about out on the veranda. But ideally you and your friends wanted the place just to yourselves, so there was often jockeying and arguing. The guardians were always telling us to be civilised about it, but in practice, you needed to have some strong personalities in your group to stand a chance of getting the pavilion during a break or free period. I wasn’t exactly the wilting type myself, but I suppose it was really because of Ruth we got in there as often as we did.Usually we just spread ourselves around the chairs and benches—there’d be five of us, six if Jenny B. came along—and had a good gossip. There was a kind of conversation that could only happen when you were hidden away in the pavilion; we might discuss something that was worrying us, or we might end up screaming with laughter, or in a furious row. Mostly, it was a way to unwind for a while with your closest friends.On the particular afternoon I’m now thinking of, we were standing up on stools and benches, crowding around the high windows. That gave us a clear view of the North Playing Field where about a dozen boys from our year and Senior 3 had gathered to play football. There was bright sunshine, but it must have been raining earlier that day because I can remember how the sun was glinting on the muddy surface of the grass.Someone said we shouldn’t be so obvious about watching, but we hardly moved back at all. Then Ruth said: “He doesn’t suspect a thing. Look at him. He really doesn’t suspect a thing.”When she said this, I looked at her and searched for signs of disapproval about what the boys were going to do to Tommy. But the next second Ruth gave a little laugh and said: “The idiot!”And I realised that for Ruth and the others, whatever the boys chose to do was pretty remote from us; whether we approved or not didn’t come into it. We were gathered around the windows at that moment not because we relished the prospect of seeing Tommy get humiliated yet again, but just because we’d heard about this latest plot and were vaguely curious to watch it unfold. In those days, I don’t think what the boys did amongst themselves went much deeper than that. For Ruth, for the others, it was that detached, and the chances are that’s how it was for me too.Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong. Maybe even then, when I saw Tommy rushing about that field, undisguised delight on his face to be accepted back in the fold again, about to play the game at which he so excelled, maybe I did feel a little stab of pain. What I do remember is that I noticed Tommy was wearing the light blue polo shirt he’d got in the Sales the previous month—the one he was so proud of. I remember thinking: “He’s really stupid, playing football in that. It’ll get ruined, then how’s he going to feel?” Out loud, I said, to no one in particular: “Tommy’s got his shirt on. His favourite polo shirt.”I don’t think anyone heard me, because they were all laughing at Laura—the big clown in our group—mimicking one after the other the expressions that appeared on Tommy’s face as he ran, waved, called, tackled. The other boys were all moving around the field in that deliberately languorous way they have when they’re warming up, but Tommy, in his excitement, seemed already to be going full pelt. I said, louder this time: “He’s going to be so sick if he ruins that shirt.” This time Ruth heard me, but she must have thought I’d meant it as some kind of joke, because she laughed half-heartedly, then made some quip of her own.Then the boys had stopped kicking the ball about, and were standing in a pack in the mud, their chests gently rising and falling as they waited for the team picking to start. The two captains who emerged were from Senior 3, though everyone knew Tommy was a better player than any of that year. They tossed for first pick, then the one who’d won stared at the group.“Look at him,” someone behind me said. “He’s completely convinced he’s going to be first pick. Just look at him!”There was something comical about Tommy at that moment, something that made you think, well, yes, if he’s going to be that daft, he deserves what’s coming. The other boys were all pre- tending to ignore the picking process, pretending they didn’t care where they came in the order. Some were talking quietly to each other, some re-tying their laces, others just staring down at their feet as they trammelled the mud. But Tommy was looking eagerly at the Senior 3 boy, as though his name had already been called.Laura kept up her performance all through the team-picking, doing all the different expressions that went across Tommy’s face: the bright eager one at the start; the puzzled concern when four picks had gone by and he still hadn’t been chosen; the hurt and panic as it began to dawn on him what was really going on. I didn’t keep glancing round at Laura, though, because I was watching Tommy; I only knew what she was doing because the others kept laughing and egging her on. Then when Tommy was left standing alone, and the boys all began sniggering, I heard Ruth say:“It’s coming. Hold it. Seven seconds. Seven, six, five . . .”She never got there. Tommy burst into thunderous bellowing, and the boys, now laughing openly, started to run off towards the South Playing Field. Tommy took a few strides after them—it was hard to say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was panicked at being left behind. In any case he soon stopped and stood there, glaring after them, his face scarlet. Then he began to scream and shout, a nonsensical jumble of swear words and insults.We’d all seen plenty of Tommy’s tantrums by then, so we came down off our stools and spread ourselves around the room. We tried to start up a conversation about something else, but there was Tommy going on and on in the background, and although at first we just rolled our eyes and tried to ignore it, in the end—probably a full ten minutes after we’d first moved away—we were back up at the windows again.The other boys were now completely out of view, and Tommy was no longer trying to direct his comments in any particular direction. He was just raving, flinging his limbs about, at the sky, at the wind, at the nearest fence post. Laura said he was maybe “rehearsing his Shakespeare.” Someone else pointed out how each time he screamed something he’d raise one foot off the ground, pointing it outwards, “like a dog doing a pee.” Actually, I’d noticed the same foot movement myself, but what had struck me was that each time he stamped the foot back down again, flecks of mud flew up around his shins. I thought again about his precious shirt, but he was too far away for me to see if he’d got much mud on it.“I suppose it is a bit cruel,” Ruth said, “the way they always work him up like that. But it’s his own fault. If he learnt to keep his cool, they’d leave him alone.”“They’d still keep on at him,” Hannah said. “Graham K.’s temper’s just as bad, but that only makes them all the more care- ful with him. The reason they go for Tommy’s because he’s a layabout.”Then everyone was talking at once, about how Tommy never even tried to be creative, about how he hadn’t even put anything in for the Spring Exchange. I suppose the truth was, by that stage, each of us was secretly wishing a guardian would come from the house and take him away. And although we hadn’t had any part in this latest plan to rile Tommy, we had taken out ringside seats, and we were starting to feel guilty. But there was no sign of a guardian, so we just kept swapping reasons why Tommy deserved everything he got. Then when Ruth looked at her watch and said even though we still had time, we should get back to the main house, nobody argued.Tommy was still going strong as we came out of the pavilion. The house was over to our left, and since Tommy was standing in the field straight ahead of us, there was no need to go anywhere near him. In any case, he was facing the other way and didn’t seem to register us at all. All the same, as my friends set off along the edge of the field, I started to drift over towards him. I knew this would puzzle the others, but I kept going—even when I heard Ruth’s urgent whisper to me to come back.I suppose Tommy wasn’t used to being disturbed during his rages, because his first response when I came up to him was to stare at me for a second, then carry on as before. It was like he was doing Shakespeare and I’d come up onto the stage in the middle of his performance. Even when I said: “Tommy, your nice shirt. You’ll get it all messed up,” there was no sign of him having heard me.So I reached forward and put a hand on his arm. Afterwards, the others thought he’d meant to do it, but I was pretty sure it was unintentional. His arms were still flailing about, and he wasn’t to know I was about to put out my hand. Anyway, as he threw up his arm, he knocked my hand aside and hit the side of my face. It didn’t hurt at all, but I let out a gasp, and so did most of the girls behind me.That’s when at last Tommy seemed to become aware of me, of the others, of himself, of the fact that he was there in that field, behaving the way he had been, and stared at me a bit stupidly.“Tommy,” I said, quite sternly. “There’s mud all over your shirt.”“So what?” he mumbled. But even as he said this, he looked down and noticed the brown specks, and only just stopped himself crying out in alarm. Then I saw the surprise register on his face that I should know about his feelings for the polo shirt.“It’s nothing to worry about,” I said, before the silence got humiliating for him. “It’ll come off. If you can’t get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody.”He went on examining his shirt, then said grumpily: “It’s nothing to do with you anyway.”He seemed to regret immediately this last remark and looked at me sheepishly, as though expecting me to say something comforting back to him. But I’d had enough of him by now, particularly with the girls watching—and for all I knew, any number of others from the windows of the main house. So I turned away with a shrug and rejoined my friends.Ruth put an arm around my shoulders as we walked away. “At least you got him to pipe down,” she said. “Are you okay? Mad animal.” Read more

Howl's Moving Castle

About the Author In a career spanning four decades, award-winning author Diana Wynne Jones (1934‒2011) wrote more than forty books of fantasy for young readers. Characterized by magic, multiple universes, witches and wizards—and a charismatic nine-lived enchanter—her books are filled with unlimited imagination, dazzling plots, and an effervescent sense of humor that earned her legendary status in the world of fantasy. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. howl's mo By Diana Jones HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright ©2008 Diana JonesAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780061478789 Chapter One In which Sophie talks to hats In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes. Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success. Her parents were well to do and kept a ladies' hat shop in the prosperous town of Market Chipping. True, her own mother died when Sophie was two years old and her sister Lettie was one year old, and their father married his youngest shop assistant, a pretty blonde girl called Fanny. Fanny shortly gave birth to the third sister, Martha. This ought to have made Sophie and Lettle into Ugly Sisters, but in fact all three girls grew up very pretty indeed, though Lettie was the one everyone said was most beautiful. Fanny treated all three girls with the same kindness and did not favor Martha in the least. Mr. Hatter was proud of his three daughters and sent them all to the best school in town. Sophie was the most studious. She read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future. It was a disappointment to her, but she was still happy enough, looking after her sisters and grooming Martha to seek her fortune when the time came. Since Fanny was always busy in the shop, Sophie was the one who looked after the younger two. There was a certain amount of screaming and hairpulling between those younger two. Lettie was by no means resigned to being the one who, next to Sophie, was bound to be the least successful. "It's not fair!" Lettie would shout. "Why should Martha have the best of it just because she was born the youngest? I shall marry a prince, so there!" To which Martha always retorted that she would end up disgustingly rich without having to marry anybody. Then Sophie would have to drag them apart and mend their clothes. She was very deft with her needle. As time went on, she made clothes for her sisters too. There was one deep rose outfit she made for Lettie, the May Day before this story really starts, which Fanny said looked as if it had come from the most expensive shop in Kingsbury. About this time everyone began talking of the Witch of the Waste again. It was said the Witch had threatened the life of the King's daughter and that the King had commanded his personal magician, Wizard Suliman, to go into the Waste and deal with the Witch. And it seemed that Wizard Stillman had not only failed to deal with the Witch: he had got himself killed by her. So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly at night. What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty gray gusts. For a while everyone was certain that the castle would come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to the King for help. But the castle stayed roving about the hills, and it was learned that it did not belong to the Witch but toWizard Howl. Wizard Howl was bad enough. Though he did not seem to want to leave the hills, he was known to amuse himself by collecting young girls and sucking the souls from them. Or some people said he ate their hearts. He was an utterly cold-blooded and heartless wizard and no young girl was safe from him if he caught her on her own. Sophie, Lettie, and Martha, along with all the other girls in Market Chipping, were warned never to go out alone, which was a great annoyance to them. They wondered what use Wizard Howl found for all the souls he collected. They had other things on their minds before long, however, for Mr. Hatter died suddenly just as Sophie was old enough to leave school for good. It then appeared that Mr. Hatter had been altogether too proud of his daughters. The school fees he had been paying had left the shop with quite heavy debts. When the funeral was over, Fanny sat down in the parlor in the house next door to the shop and explained the situation. "You'll all have to leave that school, I'm afraid," she said. "I've been doing sums back and front and sideways, and the only way I can see to keep the business going and take care of the three of you is to see you all settled in a promising apprenticeship somewhere. It isn't practical to have you all in the shop. I can't afford it. So this is what I've decided. Lettie first -- " Continues... Excerpted from howl's mo by Diana Jones Copyright ©2008 by Diana Jones. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

I, Robot (The Robot Series)

Amazon.com Review In this collection, one of the great classics of science fiction, Asimov set out the principles of robot behavior that we know as the Three Laws of Robotics. Here are stories of robots gone mad, mind-reading robots, robots with a sense of humor, robot politicians, and robots who secretly run the world, all told with Asimov's trademark dramatic blend of science fact and science fiction. About the Author Isaac Asimov began his Foundation Series at the age of twenty-one, not realizing that it would one day be considered a cornerstone of science fiction. During his legendary career, Asimov penned over 470 books on subjects ranging from science to Shakespeare to history, though he was most loved for his award-winning science fiction sagas, which include the Robot, Empire, and Foundation series. Named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Asimov entertained and educated readers of all ages for close to five decades. He died, at the age of seventy-two, in April 1992. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ROBBIE"Ninety-eight--ninety-nine--one hundred." Gloria withdrew her chubby little forearm from before her eyes and stood for a moment, wrinkling her nose and blinking in the sunlight. Then, trying to watch in all directions at once, she withdrew a few cautious steps from the tree against which she had been leaning.She craned her neck to investigate the possibilities of a clump of bushes to the right and then withdrew farther to obtain a better angle for viewing its dark recesses. The quiet was profound except for the incessant buzzing of insects and the occasional chirrup of some hardy bird, braving the midday sun.Gloria pouted, "I bet he went inside the house, and I've told him a million times that that's not fair."With tiny lips pressed together tightly and a severe frown crinkling her forehead, she moved determinedly toward the two-story building up past the driveway.Too late she heard the rustling sound behind her, followed by the distinctive and rhythmic clump-clump of Robbie's metal feet. She whirled about to see her triumphing companion emerge from hiding and make for the home-tree at full speed.Gloria shrieked in dismay. "Wait, Robbie! That wasn't fair, Robbie! You promised you wouldn't run until I found you." Her little feet could make no headway at all against Robbie's giant strides. Then, within ten feet of the goal, Robbie's pace slowed suddenly to the merest of crawls, and Gloria, with one final burst of wild speed, dashed pantingly past him to touch the welcome bark of home-tree first.Gleefully, she turned on the faithful Robbie, and with the basest of ingratitude, rewarded him for his sacrifice by taunting him cruelly for a lack of running ability."Robbie can't run," she shouted at the top of her eight-year-old voice. "I can beat him any day. I can beat him any day." She chanted the words in a shrill rhythm.Robbie didn't answer, of course--not in words. He pantomimed running instead, inching away until Gloria found herself running after him as he dodged her narrowly, forcing her to veer in helpless circles, little arms outstretched and fanning at the air."Robbie," she squealed, "stand still!"--And the laughter was forced out of her in breathless jerks.--Until he turned suddenly and caught her up, whirling her round, so that for her the world fell away for a moment with a blue emptiness beneath, and green trees stretching hungrily downward toward the void. Then she was down in the grass again, leaning against Robbie's leg and still holding a hard, metal finger.After a while, her breath returned. She pushed uselessly at her disheveled hair in vague imitation of one of her mother's gestures and twisted to see if her dress were torn.She slapped her hand against Robbie's torso, "Bad boy! I'll spank you!"And Robbie cowered, holding his hands over his face so that she had to add, "No, I won't, Robbie. I won't spank you. But anyway, it's my turn to hide now because you've got longer legs and you promised not to run till I found you."Robbie nodded his head--a small parallelepiped with rounded edges and corners attached to a similar but much larger parallelepiped that served as torso by means of a short, flexible stalk--and obediently faced the tree. A thin, metal film descended over his glowing eyes and from within his body came a steady, resonant ticking."Don't peek now--and don't skip any numbers," warned Gloria, and scurried for cover.With unvarying regularity, seconds were ticked off, and at the hundredth, up went the eyelids, and the glowing red of Robbie's eyes swept the prospect. They rested for a moment on a bit of colorful gingham that protruded from behind a boulder. He advanced a few steps and convinced himself that it was Gloria who squatted behind it.Slowly, remaining always between Gloria and home-tree, he advanced on the hiding place, and when Gloria was plainly in sight and could no longer even theorize to herself that she was not seen, he extended one arm toward her, slapping the other against his leg so that it rang again. Gloria emerged sulkily."You peeked!" she exclaimed, with gross unfairness. "Besides I'm tired of playing hide-and-seek. I want a ride."But Robbie was hurt at the unjust accusation, so he seated himself carefully and shook his head ponderously from side to side.Gloria changed her tone to one of gentle coaxing immediately, "Come on, Robbie. I didn't mean it about the peeking. Give me a ride."Robbie was not to be won over so easily, though. He gazed stubbornly at the sky, and shook his head even more emphatically."Please, Robbie, please give me a ride." She encircled his neck with rosy arms and hugged tightly. Then, changing moods in a moment, she moved away. "If you don't, I'm going to cry," and her face twisted appallingly in preparation.Hard-hearted Robbie paid scant attention to this dreadful possibility, and shook his head a third time. Gloria found it necessary to play her trump card."If you don't," she exclaimed warmly, "I won't tell you any more stories, that's all. Not one--"Robbie gave in immediately and unconditionally before this ultimatum, nodding his head vigorously until the metal of his neck hummed. Carefully, he raised the little girl and placed her on his broad, flat shoulders.Gloria's threatened tears vanished immediately and she crowed with delight. Robbie's metal skin, kept at a constant temperature of seventy by the high resistance coils within, felt nice and comfortable, while the beautifully loud sound her heels made as they bumped rhythmically against his chest was enchanting."You're an air-coaster, Robbie, you're a big, silver air-coaster. Hold out your arms straight. --You got to, Robbie, if you're going to be an air-coaster."The logic was irrefutable. Robbie's arms were wings catching the air currents and he was a silver 'coaster.Gloria twisted the robot's head and leaned to the right. He banked sharply. Gloria equipped the 'coaster with a motor that went "Br-r-r" and then with weapons that went "Powie" and "Sh-sh-shshsh." Pirates were giving chase and the ship's blasters were coming into play. The pirates dropped in a steady rain."Got another one. --Two more," she cried.Then "Faster, men," Gloria said pompously, "we're running out of ammunition." She aimed over her shoulder with undaunted courage and Robbie was a blunt-nosed spaceship zooming through the void at maximum acceleration.Clear across the field he sped, to the patch of tall grass on the other side, where he stopped with a suddenness that evoked a shriek from his flushed rider, and then tumbled her onto the soft, green carpet.Gloria gasped and panted, and gave voice to intermittent whispered exclamations of "That was nice!"Robbie waited until she had caught her breath and then pulled gently at a lock of hair."You want something?" said Gloria, eyes wide in an apparently artless complexity that fooled her huge "nursemaid" not at all. He pulled the curl harder."Oh, I know. You want a story."Robbie nodded rapidly."Which one?"Robbie made a semi-circle in the air with one finger.The little girl protested, "Again? I've told you Cinderella a million times. Aren't you tired of it? --It's for babies."Another semi-circle."Oh, well," Gloria composed herself, ran over the details of the tale in her mind (together with her own elaborations, of which she had several) and began:"Are you ready? Well--once upon a time there was a beautiful little girl whose name was Ella. And she had a terribly cruel step-mother and two very ugly and very cruel step-sisters and--"Gloria was reaching the very climax of the tale--midnight was striking and everything was changing back to the shabby originals lickety-split, while Robbie listened tensely with burning eyes--when the interruption came."Gloria!"It was the high-pitched sound of a woman who has been calling not once, but several times; and had the nervous tone of one in whom anxiety was beginning to overcome impatience."Mamma's calling me," said Gloria, not quite happily. "You'd better carry me back to the house, Robbie."Robbie obeyed with alacrity for somehow there was that in him which judged it best to obey Mrs. Weston, without as much as a scrap of hesitation. Gloria's father was rarely home in the daytime except on Sunday--today, for instance--and when he was, he proved a genial and understanding person. Gloria's mother, however, was a source of uneasiness to Robbie and there was always the impulse to sneak away from her sight.Mrs. Weston caught sight of them the minute they rose above the masking tufts of long grass and retired inside the house to wait."I've shouted myself hoarse, Gloria," she said, severely. "Where were you?""I was with Robbie," quavered Gloria. "I was telling him Cinderella, and I forgot it was dinner-time.""Well, it's a pity Robbie forgot, too." Then, as if that reminded her of the robot's presence, she whirled upon him. "You may go, Robbie. She doesn't need you now." Then, brutally, "And don't come back till I call you."Robbie turned to go, but hesitated as Gloria cried out in his defense, "Wait, Mamma, you got to let him stay. I didn't finish Cinderella for him. I said I would tell him Cinderella and I'm not finished.""Gloria!""Honest and truly, Mamma, he'll stay so quiet, you won't even know he's here. He can sit on the chair in the corner, and he won't say a word,--I mean he won't do anything. Will you, Robbie?"Robbie, appealed to, nodded his massive head up and down once."Gloria, if you don't stop this at once, you shan't see Robbie for a whole week."The girl's eyes fell, "All right! But Cinderella is his favorite story and I didn't finish it. --And he likes it so much."The robot left with a disconsolate step and Gloria choked back a sob.George Weston was comfortable. It was a habit of his to be comfortable on Sunday afternoons. A good, hearty dinner below the hatches; a nice, soft, dilapidated couch on which to sprawl; a copy of the Times; slippered feet and shirtless chest;--how could anyone help but be comfortable?He wasn't pleased, therefore, when his wife walked in. After ten years of married life, he still was so unutterably foolish as to love her, and there was no question that he was always glad to see her--still Sunday afternoons just after dinner were sacred to him and his idea of solid comfort was to be left in utter solitude for two or three hours. Consequently, he fixed his eye firmly upon the latest reports of the Lefebre-Yoshida expedition to Mars (this one was to take off from Lunar Base and might actually succeed) and pretended she wasn't there.Mrs. Weston waited patiently for two minutes, then impatiently for two more, and finally broke the silence."George!""Hmpph?""George, I say! Will you put down that paper and look at me?"The paper rustled to the floor and Weston turned a weary face toward his wife, "What is it, dear?""You know what it is, George. It's Gloria and that terrible machine.""What terrible machine?""Now don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. It's that robot Gloria calls Robbie. He doesn't leave her for a moment.""Well, why should he? He's not supposed to. And he certainly isn't a terrible machine. He's the best darn robot money can buy and I'm damned sure he set me back half a year's income. He's worth it, though--darn sight cleverer than half my office staff."He made a move to pick up the paper again, but his wife was quicker and snatched it away."You listen to me, George. I won't have my daughter entrusted to a machine--and I don't care how clever it is. It has no soul, and no one knows what it may be thinking. A child just isn't made to be guarded by a thing of metal."Weston frowned, "When did you decide this? He's been with Gloria two years now and I haven't seen you worry till now.""It was different at first. It was a novelty; it took a load off me, and--and it was a fashionable thing to do. But now I don't know. The neighbors--""Well, what have the neighbors to do with it. Now, look. A robot is infinitely more to be trusted than a human nursemaid. Robbie was constructed for only one purpose really--to be the companion of a little child. His entire 'mentality' has been created for the purpose. He just can't help being faithful and loving and kind. He's a machine--made so. That's more than you can say for humans.""But something might go wrong. Some--some--" Mrs. Weston was a bit hazy about the insides of a robot, "some little jigger will come loose and the awful thing will go berserk and--and--" She couldn't bring herself to complete the quite obvious thought."Nonsense," Weston denied, with an involuntary nervous shiver. "That's completely ridiculous. We had a long discussion at the time we bought Robbie about the First Law of Robotics. You know that it is impossible for a robot to harm a human being; that long before enough can go wrong to alter that First Law, a robot would be completely inoperable. It's a mathematical impossibility. Besides I have an engineer from U.S. Robots here twice a year to give the poor gadget a complete overhaul. Why, there's no more chance of anything at all going wrong with Robbie than there is of you or I suddenly going looney--considerably less, in fact. Besides, how are you going to take him away from Gloria?"He made another futile stab at the paper and his wife tossed it angrily into the next room."That's just it, George! She won't play with anyone else. There are dozens of little boys and girls that she should make friends with, but she won't. She won't go near them unless I make her. That's no way for a little girl to grow up. You want her to be normal, don't you? You want her to be able to take her part in society.""You're jumping at shadows, Grace. Pretend Robbie's a dog. I've seen hundreds of children who would rather have their dog than their father.""A dog is different, George. We must get rid of that horrible thing. You can sell it back to the company. I've asked, and you can.""You've asked? Now look here, Grace, let's not go off the deep end. We're keeping the robot until Gloria is older and I don't want the subject brought up again." And with that he walked out of the room in a huff.Mrs. Weston met her husband at the door two evenings later. "You'll have to listen to this, George. There's bad feeling in the village." Read more

Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises

About the Author Mark Carwardine is a zoologist, writer, photographer, consultant, and broadcaster with a special interest in marine wildlife. He has written more than 40 books and has hosted natural history programs on BBC Radio. Martin Camm is a gifted natural history artist who specializes in studying each species in its native environment.