S.J. Parris
S.J. Parris writes about her inspiration for Heresy, which masterfully blends true events with fiction into a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
Adam Haslett
A conversation with Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the twenty-first century.
With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost. Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry your heart away.
The house on Mary Street was home to Jennifer; her older brother B.J.; their hardworking father, who smelled like aftershave and read her Snow White; and their mother, who called her little daughter Sunshine and embraced Jackie Kennedy's sense of style. Through a child's eyes, the skies of Carson City were forever blue, and life was perfect -- a world of Barbies, Bewitched, and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with hairspray, powder, and a kiss on the cheek....But soon, everything Jennifer has come to love and rely on begins to crumble, sending her on a roller coaster of loss and loneliness. In a world unhinged by tragedy, where beautiful mothers die and families are warped by more than they can bear, a young girl must transcend a landscape of pain and mistreatment to discover her richest resource: her own unshakable will to survive.
Book Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
A searing, soaring memoir of one girl's complicated and almost unbelievable childhood.
Publisher's Weekly
It's impossible not to be moved by the young girl's plight; it's equally impossible not to admire the adult's strength and courage in surviving it.
Frank McCourt Author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis
The unblinking look of one child at a hard world. Written gloriously and movingly.
Marion Winik Author of First Comes Love and Telling
Jennifer Lauck shares a different order of memory, expressed with heartrending immediacy and transparency.
Laura Cunningham Author of A Place in the Country
A tender and delicately rendered tale of a young girl's survival.
Diana Abu-Jaber Author of Arabian Jazz
Direct, evocative, and emotionally honest, Blackbird will haunt readers with its startling story and its vibrant narration.
Gregg Kleiner Author of Where River Turns to Sky Blackbird is Lauck's stunning testament to the inborn ability children have to survive. By the book's bittersweet final pages, you're on your feet cheering for her.
Hope Edelman Author of Motherless Daughters
This is one of those rare books that captures both the innocence of the child narrator and the wisdom of the adult author....Blackbird is both a tribute to the author's mother and to her own powers of survival. I was so caught up in Jennifer's story I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, yet I didn't want this book to end
When his daughter, Amy, died suddenly of a heart condition, Roger Rosenblatt and his wife moved in with their son-in-law and their three young grandchildren. His story tells how a family makes the possible out of the impossible.
You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family.
The Postmistress is an unforgettable tale of the secrets we must bear, or bury. It is about what happens to love during wartime, when those we cherish leave. And how every story-of love or war-is about looking left when we should have been looking right.
Masterfully blending true events with fiction, this blockbuster historical thriller delivers a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love. The Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope.
I read this book in two days and found it so refreshing. Although you will learn a great deal about barn owls by reading it, the book is not just ...
read more
I enjoyed reading this book, however, feel that this is not completely her own ideas. This books remembers me of a cross between 'ghost','Sixth ...
read more
Lisa See has written a great book! This story is satisfying on many levels, some scenes horrifying, but seemingly truthful, and her handling of the ...
read more
Amazon 'buy button' rumors abound(Mar 18 2010) Rumors swirled today that Amazon could revoke the buy buttons for books by Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin, or Hachette if the major publishers can't...
Full Story
Amazon's e-pricing threats(Mar 18 2010) With Apple's iPad launch just weeks away, Amazon raised the stakes again when it threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online...
Full Story