A novel full of grand passion and intensity, The Soldier's Wife asks "What would you do for your family?", "What should you do for a stranger?", and "What would you do for love?" As World War II draws closer and closer to Guernsey, Vivienne de la Mare knows that there will be sacrifices to be made. Not just for herself, but for her two young daughters and for her mother-in-law, for whom she cares while her husband is away fighting. What she does not expect is that she will fall in love with one of the enigmatic German soldiers who take up residence in the house next door to her home. As their relationship intensifies, so do the pressures on Vivienne. Food and resources grow scant, and the restrictions placed upon the residents of the island grow with each passing week. Though Vivienne knows the perils of her love affair with Gunther, she believes that she can keep their relationship--and her family--safe. But when she becomes aware of the full brutality of the Occupation, she must decide if she is willing to risk her personal happiness for the life of a stranger. Includes a reading group guide for book clubs.
When seventeen-year-old Stella Whittaker is offered the chance to study at the Academy of Music in Vienna it's a dream-come-true. Seduced by the elegant beauty of the city, Stella explores the magnificent palaces, gardens and fashionable coffee houses, and after a chance meeting in an art gallery, falls in love with Harri Reznik, a young Jewish doctor. But as the threat of war casts a dark shadow over Europe, Stella soon discovers that both the household where she lives, and the city she has come to call home, are not as welcoming as they once seemed ... "--Publisher description.
September 1940. England is at war and London has become an ever-fragile place for widowed Livia Ripley and her two young daughters, Polly and Eliza. When Livia meets charismatic publisher Hugo Ballantyne, she is hopeful that her life is about to change for the better. But as clouds gather in the autumn sky, the wail of the siren heralds the arrival of the Luftwaffe. Livia volunteers to be a warden and finds the reality and despair of war a contrast to the comfort of the Balfour Hotel with Hugo. Livia soon discovers a strength she never knew she had, which gives her the power to save those she loves.
Every once in a blue moon, a masterful writer dives into gothic waters and emerges with a novel that—like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Minette Walters's The Breaker, and Donna Tartt's The Little Friend—simultaneously celebrates and transcends the tradition. Welcome Margaret Leroy to the clan. What's the matter with Sylvie? Such a pretty girl. Four years old; well loved by her young mother, Grace. But there's something . . . "off " about the child. Her deathly fear of water; her night terrors; most of all, her fixation with a photo of an Irish seaside town called Coldharbour. "Sylvie, tell me about your picture. Why's it so special, sweetheart?" My heart is racing, but I try to make my voice quite calm. "That's my seaside, Grace." Very matter-of-fact, as though this should be obvious. "I lived there, Grace. Before." Grace doesn't know what to do with this revelation—she's barely scraping by as it is. A single mother with no family, Grace works full-time at a London flower shop to support herself and Sylvie. Overwhelmed by her inability to help her daughter, she turns to Adam Winters, a dashing psychology professor with some unusual theories about what might be troubling the child. Together, they travel to seemingly idyllic Coldharbour, hoping to understand Sylvie's mysterious connection to the place. Impossible as it may seem, Grace has to accept that her daughter may be remembering a past life. And not only that: the danger bedeviling Sylvie from her past life is still very much a threat to her in this one. Margaret Leroy has been celebrated for writing "like a dream," and her previous novels have been praised for their "hypnotic prose" and "sensuously ethereal, subtly electric drama." Now, in Yes, My Darling Daughter, Leroy offers a novel both haunted and haunting—a wonderfully original, deliciously suspenseful story that enthralls from the first page to the very last.
Chloe is a divorced woman who meets and falls in love with a married man. He leaves his wife, moves into an apartment and seems ready to live with Chloe. Her joy is short-lived when he is arrested on suspicion of child-abuse.
1940, Guernsey. Vivienne de la Mare waits nervously for the bombs to drop. Instead comes quiet surrender and insidious occupation. Nothing is safe anymore. Her husband is fighting on the frontline and the façade of being the perfect wife is cracking. Her new life is one where the enemy lives next door. Small acts of kindness from one Nazi soldier feels like a betrayal. But how can you hate your enemy when you know his name, when he makes you feel alive when everything else is dying around you? Vivienne is fighting her own private war. On one side, the safe, secret, loving world she could build with her captain; on the other, loneliness and danger. It's time for Vivienne to choose -- collaboration or resistance
1940, Guernsey. Vivienne de la Mare waits nervously for the bombs to drop. Instead comes quiet surrender and insidious occupation. Nothing is safe anymore. Her husband is fighting on the frontline and the façade of being the perfect wife is cracking. Her new life is one where the enemy lives next door. Small acts of kindness from one Nazi soldier feels like a betrayal. But how can you hate your enemy when you know his name, when he makes you feel alive when everything else is dying around you? Vivienne is fighting her own private war. On one side, the safe, secret, loving world she could build with her captain; on the other, loneliness and danger. It's time for Vivienne to choose –– collaboration or resistance
Catriona Lydgate is a housewife with two children and an adoring husband. But beneath the surface of her seemingly perfect life are the dark secrets of the past she's tried to forget. Disturbing postcards begin arriving in the mail; she is recognized by a man who knew her from her past -- an avalanche of small moments that will threaten everything she thought was real. When her youngest daughter falls ill with a mysterious illness, the doctors and even her husband suspect that she is deliberately making her child sick. As her marriage unravels, she comes dangerously close to the edge -- and to losing everything that she loves -- as the past she has fought so hard to bury becomes her witness and prosecutor. This is a haunting, heartbreaking novel: domestic fiction at its very finest.
What really goes on behind closed doors? “I've striven to be the perfect mother, wanting to create a perfect childhood for my child. Yet something has gone wrong” Catriona has the life she's always dreamed of: a loving husband, a delightful step–daughter and her own precious little girl, Daisy. When Daisy begins to feel ill, Catriona seeks help and in doing so, is forced to look to the past and her own traumatic and abusive childhood. When Catriona is accused of an unspeakable crime, she begins to realise that the life she has now is more fragile than she could ever have imagined.
The novel's story line revolves around a single moment that threatens to unravel a woman's entire life and will appeal to readers of Jane Hamilton, Sue Miller and Ann Packet. Postcards from Berlin, Leroy's previous novel, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and is being developed by the BBC into a television drama.
What if there was something deeply wrong with your child and nobody believed you? Young single mum Grace is drowning. Her little girl Sylvie is distant, troubled and prone to violent tantrums which the child psychiatrists blame on Grace. But Grace knows there's something more to what's happening to Sylvie. There has to be. Travelling from the London suburbs to the west coast of Ireland, Grace and Sylvie embark on a journey of shocking discovery, forcing Grace to question everything she believes in and changing both their lives forever.
Risking her marriage and children in her passion for another man, Ginnie Holmes witnesses a murder while engaged in a tryst and faces the prospect of coming forward and destroying her family or withholding information about a woman's killing.
Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature brings Homer's Odyssey together with contemporary literary texts ranging from Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Cormac McCarthy's The Road to produce new readings that reframe, reorient, and ultimately revise aspects of Homer's iconic story of travel and home. While some novels share with the Odyssey a celebration of the creative process of improvisation to rethink the relationship between home and travel, others draw upon nostalgia - our complicated longing for home - to unsettle the inevitability of return. Rather than offering an explicit retelling of Homer's poem, each of these novels prompts us to revisit the relationship between travel and home that Odysseus and Penelope embody to ask new questions of that well-read text. Does travel reinforce or destabilize our notion of home? Are mobility and domesticity irrevocably gendered, or can we imagine a world in which Penelope travels and Odysseus stays home? Just as Odysseus continually reinvents his own identity with each new encounter, both abroad and at home, so too we, as readers, participate in an improvisatory interpretive experiment of our own. This volume sets out a new model for reading ancient and contemporary texts together - one that challenges the conventional chronological assumptions inherent in many works of classical reception. No longer a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it the same, the Odyssey, together with the novels with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.
When psychiatrist Tessa authorises the release of Paula, a schizophrenic, then Paula loses control and murders someone. Her life shattered, Tessa goes to visit the dead woman's partner. She is attracted to him and they begin a dangerous affair.
This diverse collection of essays examines important issues related to mental health among Pacific Islanders through the topics of identity, spirituality, the unconscious, mental trauma, and healing. Contributors: Emeline Afeaki-Mafile‘o, Margaret Nelson Agee, Siautu Alefaio, A. Aukahi Austin, Tina Berking, Philip Culbertson, Caroline Salumalo Fatialofa, Yvette Guttenbeil-Po‘uhila, Joseph Keawe‘aimoku Kaholokula, David Lui, Karen Lupe, Maika Lutui, Cabrini ‘Ofa Makasiale, Tavita T. Maliko, Peta Pila Palalagi, Suiamai Simi, Seilosa Skipps-Patterson, Karanina Siaosi Sumeo, To‘oa Jemaima Tiatia, Sione Tu‘itahi, Fia T. Turner-Tupou.
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