My Dearly Beloved

“This gentle, gorgeously written book may be one of my favorites ever.” —Jenna Bush Hager (A Today show “Read with Jenna” Book Club Selection!) “A thoughtful, beautiful multigenerational novel about love, God, jealousy, and friendship.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love “A moving portrait of love and friendship set against a backdrop of social change.” —The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice) “Here is the power of the novel in its simplest, richest form: bearing intimate witness to human beings grappling with their faith and falling in love. That Wall executes it so beautifully? Well, this is exactly why we read literary fiction...The best book about faith in recent memory.” —Entertainment Weekly (A-) Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily—fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern—after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not? James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James’s escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life. In The Dearly Beloved, we follow these two couples through decades of love and friendship, jealousy and understanding, forgiveness and commitment. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church’s congregation, these four forge improbable paths through their evolving relationships, each struggling with uncertainty, heartbreak, and joy. A poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives, Cara Wall’s The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

In Thurber's world, sex is less a quest for pleasure or an expression of love than it is the retardation of emotion. And this is where Thurber makes her mark as an artist: She shows us how some parents would rather keep their offspring in their muck than Quirky and original, Lucy Thurber's STAY confirms the talent that the playwright demonstrated a few years back in the equally brilliant Where We're Born. But while her previous play was grounded in a rugged naturalism, STAY sparkles with magic and surrea

Dearly Beloved - inspired by the characters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Sometimes people do die of little trifling colds, and a tragedy at Netherfield destroys the harmony between Elizabeth Bennet and her family. As she begins her mourning under the protection of Mr. Bingley and struggles to heal from the pain of losing her beloved sister Jane, Elizabeth discovers a new source of hope in Mr. Darcy. His pride is overcome by her vulnerability, and his eyes are opened to her endearing qualities. Can he console her during the year of mourning and win her love and hand at the end of it? Will Charles Bingley, whose heart is broken, ever find love again?

The romantic side of Henry James, revealed through his letters to young male friends

Lia Habel’s spellbinding mash-up of sweeping period romance, futuristic thriller, and zombie drama rises to a whole new level of innovative storytelling with Dearly, Beloved. A high-tech, post-apocalyptic society dressed in the trappings of an antique era isn’t New Victoria’s only contradiction. Ever since the outbreak of the mysterious plague known as “The Laz” turned thousands into the living dead, those with a heartbeat and those without one have been forced to coexist. But can a nation so drastically divided survive? Though some of its zombies are mindless monsters, hungry for living flesh, others can still speak, reason, and control their ravenous appetites. And at least one unlikely couple—privileged Nora Dearly and dashing zombie ex-soldier Bram Griswold—have found true love, despite their “differences.” Still, tensions continue to grow between pro- and anti-zombie factions. As paranoia, prejudice, and terrorist attacks threaten to turn into full-scale war, scientists—living and otherwise—desperately seek a cure. But their efforts, and Nora and Bram’s budding relationship, may be doomed when a whole new strain of “The Laz” appears—and the nation of New Victoria braces for the next wave of the apocalypse. “A realistic and exciting world with a swoon-worthy romance . . . The plot is addictive, the characters well-rounded.”—RT Book Reviews “Nora and Bram’s touching and tender relationship, with its emphasis on equality and living in the moment, feels particularly special.”—Publishers Weekly, on Dearly, Departed