Leaving Lucy Pear

'Stunning language, raw emotion and profound wisdom' Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You 'Solomon's strong prose and fleet pacing consistently provide the essential pleasures of a good story well told' Maggie Shipstead, The New York Times Book Review One night in 1917 Beatrice Haven creeps out of her uncle's house on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, leaves her newborn baby at the foot of a pear tree, and watches as another woman claims the child as her own. A gifted pianist bound for Radcliffe, Bea plans to leave her shameful secret behind and make a fresh start. Ten years later, Prohibition is in full swing, post-WWI America is in the grips of rampant xenophobia, and Bea has returned to her uncle's house, seeking a refuge from her unhappiness. But the rum-running manager of the local quarry inadvertently reunites her with Emma Murphy, the headstrong Irish Catholic woman who has been raising her abandoned child - now a bright, bold, cross-dressing girl named Lucy Pear, with secrets of her own...

“From the first page, I was under Anna Solomon’s spell.” —Sue Monk Kidd From the author of The Book of V., a novel chosen as a must-read book by TIME Magazine, InStyle, Good Housekeeping, The Millions, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and BookPage Set in 1920s New England, the story of two women who are both mothers to the same unforgettable girl—a big, heartrending novel from award-winning writer Anna Solomon One night in 1917 Beatrice Haven sneaks out of her uncle's house on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, leaves her newborn baby at the foot of a pear tree, and watches as another woman claims the infant as her own. The unwed daughter of wealthy Jewish industrialists and a gifted pianist bound for Radcliffe, Bea plans to leave her shameful secret behind and make a fresh start. Ten years later, Prohibition is in full swing, post-WWI America is in the grips of rampant xenophobia, and Bea's hopes for her future remain unfulfilled. She returns to her uncle’s house, seeking a refuge from her unhappiness. But she discovers far more when the rum-running manager of the local quarry inadvertently reunites her with Emma Murphy, the headstrong Irish Catholic woman who has been raising Bea's abandoned child—now a bright, bold, cross-dressing girl named Lucy Pear, with secrets of her own. In mesmerizing prose, award-winning author Anna Solomon weaves together an unforgettable group of characters as their lives collide on the New England coast. Set against one of America's most turbulent decades, Leaving Lucy Pear delves into questions of class, freedom, and the meaning of family, establishing Anna Solomon as one of our most captivating storytellers. “Anna Solomon writes with a poet’s reverence for language and a novelist's ability to keep us turning the page. A gorgeous and engrossing meditation on motherhood, womanhood, and the sacrifices we make for love.” —J. Courtney Sullivan

"A novel about the entangled lives of two women in 1920s New England, both mothers to the same unforgettable girl"--

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK For fans of The Hours and Fates and Furies, a bold, kaleidoscopic novel intertwining the lives of three women across three centuries as their stories of sex, power, and desire finally converge in the present day. Lily is a mother and a daughter. And a second wife. And a writer, maybe? Or she was going to be, before she had children. Now, in her rented Brooklyn apartment she’s grappling with her sexual and intellectual desires, while also trying to manage her roles as a mother and a wife in 2016. Vivian Barr seems to be the perfect political wife, dedicated to helping her charismatic and ambitious husband find success in Watergate-era Washington D.C. But one night he demands a humiliating favor, and her refusal to obey changes the course of her life—along with the lives of others. Esther is a fiercely independent young woman in ancient Persia, where she and her uncle’s tribe live a tenuous existence outside the palace walls. When an innocent mistake results in devastating consequences for her people, she is offered up as a sacrifice to please the King, in the hopes that she will save them all. In Anna Solomon's The Book of V., these three characters' riveting stories overlap and ultimately collide, illuminating how women’s lives have and have not changed over thousands of years.

From the award-winning author of The Book of V., an unflinching, lushly imagined love story set against the backdrop of the epic frontier When 16-year-old Minna Losk journeys from Odessa to America as a mail-order bride, she dreams of a young, wealthy husband, a handsome townhouse, and freedom from physical labor and pogroms. But her husband Max turns out to be twice her age, rigidly Orthodox, and living in a one-room sod hut in South Dakota with his two teenage sons. The country is desolate, the work treacherous. And most troubling, Minna finds herself increasingly attracted to her older stepson. As a brutal winter closes in, the family's limits are tested, and Minna, drawing on strengths she barely knows she has, is forced to confront her despair, as well as her desire. A Boston Globe Best Seller “Evocative of Alice Munro, Amy Bloom, and Willa Cather, but fueled by Anna Solomon’s singular imagination . . . a masterful debut . . . embroidered with sage, beautiful writing on every page . . . marks the start of a long, fine, and important career.” —Jenna Blum, author of Those Who Save Us “Minna is a terrifically complex heroine: a little snobby, a little selfish and wholly sympathetic.” —The New York Times “Like...Jonathan Safran Foer and Dara Horn. [A] wondrously strange story of Jewish immigration.” —Miami Herald “This mythic rendition of the American immigrant narrative...finds the wondrous in the ordinary and vividly depicts the complex collisions between the Old World and the New.” —More

Thirty acclaimed writers share their personal birth stories—the extraordinary, the ordinary, the terrifying, the sublime, the profane It's an elemental, almost animalistic urge—the expectant mother's hunger for birth narratives. Bookstores are filled with month-by-month pregnancy manuals, but the shelves are virtually empty of artful, entertaining, unvarnished accounts of labor and delivery—the stories that new mothers need most. Here is a book that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the twenty-first century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll read about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to ten-pound babies. These women give birth in the hospital, at home, in bathtubs, and, yes, even in the car. Some revel in labor, some fear labor, some feel defeated by labor, some are fulfilled by it—and all are amazed by it. You will laugh, weep, squirm, perhaps groan in recognition, and undoubtedly gasp with surprise. And then you'll call every mother or mother-to-be that you know and say "You MUST read Labor Day." Contributors: Nuar Alsadir Amy Brill Susan Burton Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Lan Samantha Chang Phoebe Damrosch Claire Dederer Jennifer Gilmore Julia Glass Arielle Greenberg Lauren Groff Eleanor Henderson Cristina Henriquez Amy Herzog Ann Hood Sarah Jefferis Heidi Julavits Mary Beth Keane Marie Myung-Ok Lee Edan Lepucki Heidi Pitlor Joanna Rakoff Jane Roper Danzy Senna Dani Shapiro Anna Solomon Cheryl Strayed Sarah A. Strickley Rachel Jamison Webster Gina Zucker

In Spring Green, Wisconsin, spinster sisters Milly and Twiss have spent their lives listening to heartbeats and heartaches, nursing birds and the people who bring them back to health. Back in the summer of 1947, Milly and Twiss knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally broken. Milly was known as a great beauty with emerald eyes and Twiss was a brazen wild child who never wore a dress or did what she was told. That was the summer their golf pro father had an accident that cost him both his swing and his charm, and their mother, the daughter of a wealthy jeweler, finally admitted that their hardscrabble lives wouldn't change. It was the summer their priest, Father Rice, announced that God didn't exist and ran off to Mexico, and a boy named Asa finally caught Milly's eye. Most unforgettably, it was also the summer their cousin Bett came down from a town called Deadwater and changed the course of their lives forever. Rebecca Rasmussen's masterful debut novel is full of hope and beauty, heartbreak and sacrifice, love and the power of sisterhood, offering wonderful surprises at every turn.