Dale Loves Sophie To Death

Robb Forman Dew's cult first novel explores themes of familial and romantic bonds as it tells the story of a woman whose husband stays behind in New England while she and their children spend the summer in her Midwestern hometown.

To mark the publication of Robb Forman Dew's major and long-awaited new novel, The Evidence against Her (see page 10), Back Bay Books is proud to issue a new paperback edition of her award-winning first work of fiction.

Robb Forman Dew's cult first novel explores themes of familial and romantic bonds as it tells the story of a woman whose husband stays behind in New England while she and their children spend the summer in her Midwestern hometown.

Now restored to print -- the acclaimed second novel by the National Book Award-winning author of Dale Loves Sophie to Death and The Evidence Against Her. Claudia and Avery Parks, lovers since high school, are now in their thirties. Intelligent, charming, sympathetic, they seem to be the ideal couple, the perfect dinner-party guests, almost everything people should be -- except responsible. They are causally yet cruelly oblivious to the ways in which their words and actions affect other people, most particularly their talented 11-year-old daughter, who suffers the misfortune of being treated by her parents not as a child but as an equal. An engrossing domestic tale by a novelist of the first rank -- an ideal selection for reading groups. Robb Forman Dew's first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, received the National Book Award in 1982.

The Howells family are revisited in the summer of 1991. David, 18, is preparing to go to Harvard and Sarah is now 13. A young woman, Netta Breckenridge, enters the family's lives and creates a fragile domesticity for the Howells.

From a National Book Award winner comes a masterful novel set in the 1940s about a woman finding a new life for herself and her grown children after her husband's death.

This book brings together a sensitive understanding of love and an unusually careful, even painstaking, analysis of the enormous but often neglected role of morality and the virtues in love. Martin's discussions of such virtues as caring, courage, fidelity, and honesty are superb, the examples well-chosen, the argument personal but nevertheless rigorous, the prose accessible and enjoyable to read.

After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield realizes that she is truly weary of the routine her life has become. But how, at 51, can she establish an identity apart from what has so long defined her? Often eloquent, sometimes blunt, and always full of fire, The Scofield clan is not a family that keeps its opinions to itself. As much as she'd like to, Agnes can no more deflect their adamant advice than she can step down as their matriarch. And despite her newfound freedom, Agnes finds herself becoming even more entangled in the family web. She shepherds her daughter-in-law, Lavinia, who moves in with her own two daughters to escape her husband's drinking. She puts out fires, smoothes fraying nerves, and, stunned as anyone, receives a marriage proposal. Having expected her life to become smaller, Agnes is amazed to see it grow instead. Robb Forman Dew intricately weaves together personal and family life into a richly wrought tapestry of the country in the 1950s and beyond. Being Polite to Hitler is a moving, frank, and surprising portrait of post-World War II America.