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A stunning novel about a marriage that begins in passion and becomes violent, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of "Thinking Out Loud." Fran Benedetto tells a spellbinding story of how a passionate marriage became a nightmare, and what finally makes her run away to start a new life with her son, under a new name. Living in fear of discovery, yet also with increasing confidence, freedom, and hope, Fran unravels the complex threads of family, identity, and desire that shape a woman's life, even as she struggles to create a new one; and Quindlen writes with depth, humor, and insight about the real lives of men and women, the varieties of love, the deep bond between mother and child, the solace of family and friendship.
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Random House Audio, $24, ISBN: 0375401903
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ALSO BY ANNA QUINDLEN
The author of such bestselling novels as Seventh Heaven and Practical Magic creates her most glorious fictional world to date in a spellbinding tale of love and obsession. After nearly 20 years of living in California, March Murray and her daughter Gwen return to March's small Massachusetts hometown. Thrust into the world of her past, March slowly comes to realize the complexity of the choices made by those around her, including Hollis, the boy she loved--now the man she can't seem to stay away from.
Movie rights have been acquired by Michael Douglas's company, Douglas/Reuther Productions.
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Brilliance Audio, $23.95, ISBN: 1561007552
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Nova Audio, $16.95, ISBN:1561009814
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ALSO BY ALICE HOFFMAN
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Hey, hey, hey, it's Bill Cosby!!
"Little Books for Beginning Readers" is a new early reader series launched by the acclaimed actor and comedian. Little Bill, the star of the series, helps get Cosby's self-esteem building messages across. Honeywood's brightly colored illustrations, portraying domestic scenes in a folksy way, will add to young readers' enjoyment. Alvin Pouissant, M.D., contributed an introduction for parents.
Oprah will feature the first three installments to the series:
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"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So the young narrator begins her life story, in the process painting an extraordinary self-portrait. Ellen's first eleven years are a long fight for survival. Her invalid, abused mother commits suicide, leaving Ellen to the mercies of her daddy, a drunken brute, and after his death to the mercies of her grandmother, a bitter and vengeful woman. Against all odds, Ellen never gives up her belief that there is a place for her in the world which will satisfy her longing for love, acceptance, and order. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heartwrenching novel . . . [Ellen Foster] is as much a part of the backwoods South as a Faulkner character -- and a good deal more endearing."
"Filled with lively humor, compassion and integrity. . . Ellen Foster may be the most trustworthy character in recent fiction."
--Alice Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review
"The story of a redoubtable girl who oversomes adversity with humor, spunk, and
determination, Kaye Gibbons's first novel is a work of considerable subtlety and intellectual sophistication, A terrific book."
--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
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When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life. A Virtuous Woman is a multilayered and indelibly convincing portrait of two seemingly ill-matched people who somehow miraculously make a marriage.
"So true and so vital I would swear that there were moments when A Virtuous Woman actually vibrated in my hands."
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Complex, compact . . . The architecture of this novel is remarkable."
--New York Times Book Review
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Kaye Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina in 1960. She graduated from Rocky Mount High School and continued her education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at Chapel Hill, she wrote her first novel, Ellen Foster, which reviewers and fans praised as an extraordinary debut. Eudora Welty said that "the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word mark the work of this talented writer." The book has been widely translated and has gained wide course adoption. Gibbons lives in North Carolina with her family.
Charms for the Easy Life (1993) -- A New York Times bestseller
Sights Unseen -- Also a national bestseller. In 1996, Kaye Gibbons was the youngest writer ever to receive the Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a French knighthood recognizing her contribution to French literature.
On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon -- coming summer, 1998.
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"A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living"
-- San Francisco Chronicle
From the author of "A Gathering of Old Men" and "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.
"A Lesson Before Dying" is a novel whose eloquence, thematic richness, and moral resonance have called forth comparisons to the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. In a story so simple that it might be a lost parable from the Gospels, Gaines has compressed the entire bitter history of black people in the South -- and, by extension, in America as a whole. "A Lesson Before Dying" is about the ways in which people insist on declaring the value of their lives in a time and place in which those lives count for nothing. It is about the ways in which the imprisoned may find freedom even in the moment of their death. As such, Gaines's novel transcends its minutely evoked circumstances to address the basic predicament of what it is to be a human being, a creature striving for dignity in a universe that often denies it.
"The Heart of a Woman" by Maya Angelou
Knopf
"The Rapture of Canaan" by Sheri Reynolds
Putnam
"Stones From the River" by Ursula Hegi
Simon & Schuster
"She's Come Undone" by Wally Lamb
Washington Square Press
"The Deep End of the Ocean" by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Viking Press
"Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison
New American Library Trade (reissue edition)
"The Book of Ruth" by Jane Hamilton
Anchor Books
Oprah's Book Club
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Chicago, IL 60661.
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