I adored this whipsmart novel about Sylvie Swift, a bold and brilliant young woman who, in 1862, lights out for Nashville, Tennessee, where she is immediately recruited to work as a spy for the chief of the Union Army's Secret Service while also chasing down a mysterious manuscript that may or may not be a version of Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Not only that -- she also becomes absorbed in the threatened world of the city's prostitutes, who offer her company and shelter, and who really were threatened with exile by Nashville's government during the Civil War. Such a rich and complex story would be impossible to tell in the hands of a lesser storyteller, but Fawkes handles the multiplying characters and storylines with admirable ease.
An epic novel about Civil War-era Nashville's "public women," an age-old secret society, and the earth-shaking power of the female
"A beautiful spinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the 4th century BC, and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inherited from antiquity." --Kevin Brockmeier, O. Henry Prize-winning author of The Ghost Variations
In 1862, after a tragedy at home, twenty-two-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her twin brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that's landed on their doorstep.…
What I've always loved about Clare Beams is exactly what she provides here: an immersive story gracefully told and set in a richly imagined world. At the center of this novel, Beams' second, is Irene Willard, who has retreated to a clinic in the Berkshires while she awaits the birth of her first child after five miscarriages. The clinic is run by a husband-and-wife team who are pioneering a treatment to prevent miscarriage by providing an ideal maternal environment. What Irene finds, however, is a place full of secrets, starting with a mysterious walled garden that Irene can't seem to stay out of. Along the way Beams provides plenty of food for thought about medical authority, patriarchal attitudes, and control of women's bodies -- themes that are, sadly, all too relevant to the moment.
"Genius."—The New York Times Book Review • “A teeming gothic.”—Vanity Fair • “Few novels of literary fiction are written as well as The Garden."—The LA Times
An eerie, masterful novel about pregnancy as a haunted house and the ways the female body has always been policed and manipulated, from the award-winning author of The Illness Lesson (“A masterpiece” – Elizabeth Gilbert)
In 1948, Irene Willard, who’s had five previous miscarriages in a quest to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires, is now pregnant again. She comes to an isolated house-cum-hospital in the Berkshires, run by a husband-and-wife…
This marvelous novel took me on an incredible journey to a southern Italian village full of secrets. Set in 1960, the story revolves around a young American woman struggling to leave a bad marriage, who comes to the village to set up a school and is immediately embroiled in a mysterious death for which everyone seems to have their own explanation. The austere Calabrian setting is gorgeously evoked, as is the local language -- a form of Byzantine Greek preserved over centuries due to the village's isolation -- and simple yet mouthwatering cuisine. While the narrator learns quite a bit through her efforts to solve the mystery comes to see her personal choices in a different light, it's the villagers who linger in memory. A perfect book for the person in your life who dreams of escaping to a small Italian town -- and really, who doesn't?
One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy (“Terrific” –Boston Globe).
Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.
In 1985, the shooting of Mr. Marfeo disrupts the quiet suburban neighborhood of Maple Bay and prompts thirteen-year-old Zinnia Zompa to reorganize everything she knows about her parents— their preoccupations, obsessions, and above all, their battles with each other. As her understanding of the world grows, Zinnia sees how the violence she witnesses is part of a larger pattern of domination, one that shadows the world far beyond her neighborhood, and her coming-of-age means reckoning with this darkness.
