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by Marti Leimbach - Fiction

From the author of DANIEL ISN’T TALKING and DYING YOUNG comes a shattering new novel, a page-turner about a mother and daughter who must come to terms with the choices they made, and face truths they have long refused to acknowledge.

Interview: Dorothea Benton Frank, author of All Summer Long

Jun 2, 2016

New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank is back with the perfect beach read, aptly titled ALL SUMMER LONG. It follows one charming New York couple --- prominent interior designer Olivia Ritchie and her husband, Nicholas Seymour, an English professor and true southern gentleman --- as they prepare to retire to the Lowcountry and find themselves pondering the next step of their lives. In this interview, Dottie talks to The Book Report Network's Jamie Layton about her personal style, the power of love, and whether or not money truly can buy happiness.

Would you be interested in meeting up with other book groups in your area?

June 1, 2016, 126 voters

When We Meet Again by Kristin Harmel

Emily Lyons has been laid off from her investigative reporting job and finds herself at loose ends. Into that void steps someone she thought she'd never hear from again, her estranged father --- and he needs her help. Emily's not much interested in helping her deadbeat dad, but he wants her to help him track down his own father, who disappeared after the war. Despite her misgivings, Emily is hungry for roots and family, so she begins to dig and uncovers a fascinating era in American history. 

Twain's End by Lynn Cullen

In TWAIN'S END, Lynn Cullen reimagines the tangled relationships between Mark Twain, his private secretary Isabel V. Lyon, and his business manager Ralph Ashcroft, as well as the little-known love triangle between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy, and Anne’s husband John Macy, which comes to light during their visit to Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. Add to the party a furious Clara Clemens, smarting from her own failed love affair, and carefully kept veneers shatter.

Blueprints by Barbara Delinsky

Caroline MacAfee is a skilled carpenter, and her daughter Jamie is a talented architect. Together they are the faces of “Gut It!,” a home renovation series on local public television. But when Caroline is told the network wants her daughter to replace her as host, she is devastated. For Jamie, life changes overnight when, soon after learning of the host shift, her father and his new wife die in a car accident that orphans their two-year-old son. Who am I? Both women ask, as the blueprints they've built their lives around suddenly need revising.

Editorial Content for Blueprints

Book

Teaser

Returning to her beloved New England, the New York Times bestselling author of SWEET SALT AIR explores the limits of love and asks what happens when the right man comes along at the wrong time?

Promo

Returning to her beloved New England, the New York Times bestselling author of SWEET SALT AIR explores the limits of love and asks what happens when the right man comes along at the wrong time?

About the Book

Returning to her beloved New England, the New York Times bestselling author of SWEET SALT AIR explores the limits of love and asks what happens when the right man comes along at the wrong time?

Caroline and Jamie McAfee are close. Not only do they enjoy their relationship as mother and daughter, they're in business together as the team that fronts the popular home renovation show “Gut It!” All is well with these two strong women, but when the network tells Caroline that Jamie is to replace her as host, Caroline feels betrayed by her daughter and old in the eyes of the world.
Jamie is unsettled by the cast change and devastated by her mother's anger, but she has little time to brood when a tragic accident leaves her two-year-old half-brother in her care. Accustomed to a life of order and precision, Jamie suddenly finds herself out of her depth, grappling with a toddler who misses his parents and a fiancé who doesn't want the child.

Amid such devastation, Caroline and Jamie find themselves revising the blueprints they've built their lives around. With loyalties shifting and decisions looming, mother and daughter need each other; but the rift between them is proving difficult to mend. As the women try to remake themselves and rebuild their relationship with each other, they discover that strength and even passion can come from the unlikeliest places. For Caroline, it's an old friend, whose efforts to seduce her awaken desires that have been dormant for so long that she feels foreign to herself. For Jamie, it's a staggering new attraction that allows her to breathe again --- and breathe deeply --- for the first time in forever.

A riveting novel from a master storyteller, BLUEPRINTS reminds us that sometimes love appears when we least expect it, and when we need it most.

Editorial Content for The Lottery and Other Stories

Teaser

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a classic work of short fiction, and this volume also includes 24 other stories encompassing the hilarious and the horrible, the unsettling and the ominous.

Promo

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a classic work of short fiction, and this volume also includes 24 other stories encompassing the hilarious and the horrible, the unsettling and the ominous.

About the Book

One of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” created a sensation when it was first published in 1948. Today it is considered a classic work of short fiction, a story remarkable for its combination of subtle suspense and pitch-perfect descriptions of both the chilling and the mundane. THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES also includes 24 other stories encompassing the hilarious and the horrible, the unsettling and the ominous.

Editorial Content for The Marriage of Opposites

Teaser

“A luminous, Marquez-esque tale” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from the New York Times bestselling author of THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS: a forbidden love story set on a tropical island about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro --- the Father of Impressionism.

Promo

“A luminous, Marquez-esque tale” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from the New York Times bestselling author of THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS: a forbidden love story set on a tropical island about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro --- the Father of Impressionism.

About the Book

“A luminous, Marquez-esque tale” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from the New York Times bestselling author of THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS: a forbidden love story set on a tropical island about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro --- the Father of Impressionism.

Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel’s mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for being a difficult girl who refuses to live by the rules. Growing up, Rachel’s salvation is their maid Adelle’s belief in her strengths, and her deep, life-long friendship with Jestine, Adelle’s daughter. But Rachel’s life is not her own. She is married off to a widower with three children to save her father’s business. When her older husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Frédérick, arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects all of her family, including her favorite son, who will become one of the greatest artists of France.

“A work of art” (Dallas Morning News), THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES showcases the beloved, bestselling Alice Hoffman at the height of her considerable powers. “Her lush, seductive prose, and heart-pounding subject…make this latest skinny-dip in enchanted realism…the Platonic ideal of the beach read” (Slate.com). Once forgotten to history, the marriage of Rachel and Frédérick “will only renew your commitment to Hoffman’s astonishing storytelling” (USA Today). 

Editorial Content for Sex Object: A Memoir

Teaser

Author and Guardian US columnist Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in a darkly funny and bracing memoir, Valenti explores the toll that sexism takes from the everyday to the existential.

Promo

Author and Guardian US columnist Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in a darkly funny and bracing memoir, Valenti explores the toll that sexism takes from the everyday to the existential.

About the Book

Author and Guardian US columnist Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in a darkly funny and bracing memoir, Valenti explores the toll that sexism takes from the every day to the existential.

SEX OBJECT explores the painful, funny, embarrassing, and sometimes illegal moments that shaped Valenti’s adolescence and young adulthood in New York City, revealing a much shakier inner life than the confident persona she has cultivated as one of the most recognizable feminists of her generation.

In the tradition of writers like Joan Didion and Mary Karr, this literary memoir is sure to shock those already familiar with Valenti’s work and enthrall those who are just finding it.

“Deeply moving, honest, and unflinching, SEX OBJECT secures Jessica Valenti’s place as one of the foremost writers and thinkers of her generation. Her personal story highlights universal truths about being a woman, and makes the case for why feminism today is an unstoppable force.” — Cecile Richards, President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America