Flight Of Gemma Hardy

When her widower father drowns at sea, ten-year-old Gemma Hardy, an only child, is taken from her native Iceland to Scotland, to live with her uncle’s family. But the death of her doting guardian soon after leaves Gemma under the resentful eye of her aunt. When she receives a scholarship to a private school, Gemma believes she’s found the perfect solution, and she eagerly sets out again to a new home. But at Claypoole, she finds herself treated as an unpaid servant. To Gemma’s delight, the school finally goes bankrupt in 1959 and she takes a job as an au pair on the Orkney Islands. Remote Blackbird Hall belongs to Mr. Sinclair, a rich, single London businessman; his eight-year-old niece is Gemma’s charge. An unlikely pair, Gemma and Sinclair are nonetheless drawn to each another, but their courtship is cut short by Gemma’s discovery of a secret that has shadowed her employer’s life. Set in Iceland and Scotland in the 1950s and ’60s, The Flight of Gemma Hardy is a captivating homage to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—a sweeping saga that resurrects the timeless themes of the original but is destined to become a classic all its own.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year | An O Magazine Best Book of the Year The New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy delivers another “luminous, unforgettable, and perfectly rendered” (Dennis Lehane) novel—a poignant and probing psychological drama that follows the lives of three siblings in the wake of a violent crime. One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy’s life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim’s brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford, looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back. Duncan, the youngest, who has seldom thought about being adopted, suddenly decides he wants to find his birth mother. Overshadowing all three is the awareness that something is amiss in their parents’ marriage. Over the course of the autumn, as each of the siblings confronts the complications and contradictions of their approaching adulthood, they find themselves at once drawn together and driven apart. Written with the deceptive simplicity and power of a fable, The Boy in the Field showcases Margot Livesey’s unmatched ability to “tell her tale masterfully, with intelligence, tenderness, and a shrewd understanding of all our mercurial human impulses” (Lily King, author of Euphoria).

"A ... debut set in 1920s rural Alabama following Roscoe T. Martin, a prideful electrician sent to prison after his illegal siphoning of electrical state power for his wife's family's farm leads to an innocent man's death"--

A couple begins an intense affair, only to be separated abruptly-and perhaps irrevocably-in this surprising, suspenseful love story Zeke is twenty-nine, a man who looks like a Raphael angel and who earns his living as a painter and carpenter in London. He reads the world a little differently from most people and has trouble with such ordinary activities as lying, deciphering expressions, recognizing faces. Verona is thirty-seven, confident, hot-tempered, a modestly successful radio show host, unmarried, and seven months pregnant. When the two meet in a house that Zeke is renovating, they fall in love, only to be separated less than twenty-four hours later when Verona leaves abruptly, without explanation, for Boston. Both Zeke and Verona, it turns out, have complications in their lives, though not of a romantic kind. Verona's involve her brother, Henry, who is tied up in shady financial dealings. Zeke's father has had a heart attack and his mother is threatening to run away with her lover, all of which puts pressure on Zeke to take over the family grocery business. And yet he finds himself following Verona to Boston. As he pursues her, and she pursues Henry, both are forced to ask the perplexing question: Can we ever know another person? Deftly plotted and filled with unexpected twists, Livesey's Banishing Verona marks the arrival of another lyrical and wise novel from a writer whose work "radiates with compassion and intelligence and always, deliciously, mystery" (Alice Sebold).

It seems like mutual good luck for Abigail and Dara when they meet at university and, despite their differences, become fast friends. Years later, they remain an unlikely pair: Abigail, an actress who confidently uses her charms both on and off stage, is reluctant to commit; Dara, a therapist, throws herself into every relationship with frightening intensity. Yet each seems—another stroke of luck?—to have found “true love”—Abigail with her academic boyfriend, and Dara with a tall, dark violinist. Soon, however, trouble threatens both relationships and the women’s friendship. Through four ingeniously interlocking narratives, Margot Livesey skillfully reveals how luck—good and bad—plays a vital role in our lives, and how our childhood legacies may be harder to leave behind than we hope. “Vibrant, evocative, irresistible” (Los Angeles Times), The House on Fortune Street offers a surprisingly provocative detective story of the heart, one that will keep you in its thrall.

Fate has not been kind to Gemma Hardy. Orphaned by the age of ten, neglected by a bitter and cruel aunt, sent to a boarding school where she is both servant and student, young Gemma seems destined for a life of hardship and loneliness. Yet her bright spirit burns strong. Fiercely intelligent, singularly determined, Gemma overcomes each challenge and setback, growing stronger and more certain of her path. Now an independent young woman with dreams of the future, she accepts a position as an au pair on the remote and beautiful Orkney Islands. But Gemma’s biggest trial is about to begin . . . A journey of passion and betrayal, secrets and lies, redemption and discovery that will lead her to a life she’s never dreamed of.

Replete with compelling characters and an extravagant plot, this novel of memory and redemption weaves together four separate quests for love and truth in a manner both thrilling and, ultimately, revealing about the imperfections of human nature.

Three generations of Chinese-American women in a San Francisco family must confront their past and carve out a future in this extraordinary novel, a “haunting” debut full of “shimmering and unforgettable” characters. (New York Times Book Review) The Kong women are in crisis. A disastrous trip to visit her "home" orphanage in China has plunged eighteen-year-old Ari into a self-destructive spiral. Her adoptive mother, Charlie, a lawyer with a great heart, is desperate to keep her daughter safe. Meanwhile, Charlie must endure the prickly scrutiny of her beautiful, Bryn Mawr educated mother, Gran—who, as the daughter of a cultured Chinese doctor, came to America to survive Mao's Revolution—and her sister, Les, a brilliant judge with a penchant to rule over everyone's lives. As they cope with Ari's journey of discovery and its aftermath, the Kong women will come face to face with the truths of their lives—four powerful intertwining stories of accomplishment, tenacity, secrets, loneliness, and love. Beautifully illuminating the bonds of family and blood, The Year She Left Us explores the promise and pain of adoption, the price of assimilation and achievement, the debt we owe to others, and what we owe ourselves.