The 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.

LOVE MUST FIND A WAY . . . A sheltered life in the countryside has left Diana Lindsay restless to see the wider world, for both herself and the son she is raising alone. She cannot marry, but perhaps as a courtesan she will find love and protection despite her painful past. Gathering her courage, she moves to London—and finds herself the city’s most desired woman, as admired for her charm as for her beauty. But it is one man who captivates her—handsome, haunted, and harboring a secret as deep as her own . . . Bound by the sins of his youth, Gervase Brandelin, the Viscount St. Aubyn, has spent his adulthood seeking redemption through service to England. Now a spymaster, he can allow nothing to distract him from his duty. But when he meets Diana, his burdens seem to lift. Though she can never truly be his alone, their genuine love fills him with hope, until a treacherous deceit—and a deadly enemy—threatens to tear them apart forever . . . Praise for Mary Jo Putney’s Rogues Redeemed series “A compelling story that neatly balances dangerous adventures and passionate romance.” —Booklist “A thrilling, romantic tale.” —Bookpage, Top Pick of the Month “Putney’s multifaceted and well-developed characters add depth to this romance, which is complete with the trials of war and the promise of future series installments.” —Publishers Weekly

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.

“This gentle, gorgeously written book may be one of my favorites ever.” —Jenna Bush Hager (A Today show “Read with Jenna” Book Club Selection!) This “moving portrait of love and friendship set against a backdrop of social change” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice) traces two married couples whose lives become entangled when the husbands become copastors at a famed New York city congregation in the 1960s. 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, Cara wall reminds us of “the power of the novel in its simplest, richest form: bearing intimate witness to human beings grappling with their faith and falling in love,” (Entertainment Weekly, A-) as 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, Wall offers a poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives. The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic.

Although his father has forbidden it, Ernie, a twelve-year-old business tycoon, makes a tidy profit in the pet funeral business, but when he refuses to give his star employee a raise and the business starts to fall apart, it takes the death of his own dog to bring everyone back together.

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

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

From a thrillingly talented 28-year-old newcomer - the Anne Tyler for a new generation, yet with a distinctive voice and quirky sensibility all of her own - comes a contemporary novel that brings to life a few of the 'good people of New York' and renders them in all their neurotic glory. When Roz Rosenzweig, self-described spitfire and loud n' proud New York Jew, meets Edwin Anderson at a party in the 1970s in her friend's Manhatten apartment, she has trouble believing that the earnest and soft-spoken Nebraskan is for real. But Roz is quickly attracted to Edwin and is more happy than stunned when their improbable courtship results in marriage. The unexpected good fortune of Roz and Edwin is punctuated with the birth of their daughter Miranda; and yet, as Miranda grows, it becomes clear that Roz's love for her is so fierce, so protective and so singularly focused that it might crowd out anything else in her life - including her marriage. The ties that bind Roz and her daughter together threaten to strangle Miranda as she enters her teenage years, and yet the eccentric group of friends they attract, their powerful love for one another, and the brilliant sense of humour that runs in the family, allow Roz and Miranda - along with Edwin, who remains in their lives - to somehow stay sane, even as they fight one another for room to grow. In this luminous first novel from the author of an acclaimed short story collection (Out Of the Girls' Room and Into the Night) Thisbe Nissen proves that hers is one of the most genuinely charming, witty and accomplished literary voices to emerge in quite some time.