
. Set on the outskirts of a small southern town, The Grass Harp tells the story of three endearing misfits—an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies—who one day take up residence in a tree house.
Alice I Have Been: A Novel

. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. A love story and a literary mystery, alice i have been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire.
And as alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war. For alice, for she is the mother of three grown sons, the stakes could not be higher, soldiers all. Few works of literature are as universally beloved as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, to the world around her, she knows that, she is and will always be only “Alice. Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories. Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole–and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling.
But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland.
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

More praise:"Phaedra Patrick understands the soul. Eccentric, charming, and wise…The Curious Charms is not just for those who are mourning over love or the past. He gets out of bed at precisely 7:30 a. M. Miriam, just as he did when his wife, was alive. He dresses in the same gray slacks and mustard sweater vest, Frederica, waters his fern, and heads out to his garden.
But on the one-year anniversary of Miriam’s death, something changes. Sorting through miriam’s possessions, Arthur finds an exquisite gold charm bracelet he’s never seen before. This book will illuminate your heart. Nina george, benedict stone, new york times bestselling author of The Little Paris BookshopLook for Phaedra Patrick's latest perfectly charming read, Rise and Shine, out now! .
Tender, and surprising… arthur pepper will instantly capture the hearts of readers who loved Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, insightful, Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop, and Antoine Laurain’s The Red Notebook.
After Rain: Stories

Twelve remarkable stories by the master storyteller William Trevor. Last stories is forthcoming from Viking. There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world. Wall street journal in this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, William Trevor plumbs the depths of the human heart.
Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation.
My fiction may, illuminate aspects of the human condition, now and again, but I do not consciously set out to do so. Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try. Trevor is, in his own words, "a storyteller.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel

Now gathered during a time of loss, they will reluctantly unlock the shared secrets of their past and discover if what binds them together is stronger than what tears them apart. Thrice-married Jenny is errant and passionate. Hardened by life’s disappointments, wealthy, charismatic Cody has turned cruel and envious.
In dinner at the homesick Restaurant Tyler has arrived at a new level of power. John updike, the new yorker “Marvelous, hilarious, astringent, and strewn with the banana peels of love. Cosmopolitan. Soulful and redemptive—full of heartbreak and hope—this portrait of a family will remind you why Anne Tyler is one of the most beloved writers working today.
Now grown, the siblings are inextricably linked by their memories—some painful--which hold them together despite their differences.
Other Voices, Other Rooms Vintage International

What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love. But when joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight.
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Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel

. Still life with bread Crumbs proves all the more moving because of its light, sophisticated humor. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. Anna quindlen’s marvelous romantic comedy of manners is just such a book. Quindlen’s least overtly political novel, it packs perhaps the most serious punch.
. The protagonist’s photographs are celebrated for turning the ‘minutiae of women’s lives into unforgettable images, ’ and Quindlen does the same here with her enveloping, sure-handed storytelling. People“Charming. A hot cup of tea of a story, smooth and comforting about the vulnerabilities of growing older.
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The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen

He begins writing an exposé: secretly recording the antics of day-to-day life in his retirement home, or his fellow "inmates, where he refuses to take himself, " too seriously. With an eccentric group of friends he founds the wickedly anarchic Old-But-Not-Dead Club--"Rule #3: No Whining Allowed"--and he and his best friend, gleefully stir up trouble, Evert, enraging the home's humorless director and turning themselves into unlikely heroes.
But at age 83 1/4, this feisty, indomitable curmudgeon has no plans to go out quietly. A #1 international bestseller in the vein of fredrik Bachman's A Man Called Ove: an irresistible, charming, and tender-hearted tale about friendship, love, funny, and an old man who is young at heart. Funny and frank. A story with a great deal of heart.
Graeme simsion, new york times bestselling author of THE ROSIE PROJECTTechnically speaking, Hendrik Groen is.
Ragtime: A Novel Modern Library 100 Best Novels

Selected by the modern library as one of the 100 best novels of all timePublished in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. And almost magically, between real and imaginary characters, the line between fantasy and historical fact, disappears. An extraordinary tapestry, ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The story opens in 1906 in new Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. P. Henry ford, Emma Goldman, J. One lazy sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house.
Wonderland The Wonderland Quartet Book 4

Hailed by library journal as “the greatest of Oates’s novels, ” Wonderland is the capstone of a magnificent literary excursion that plunges beneath the glossy surface of American life. The books that complete this acclaimed series, Expensive People, A Garden of Earthly Delights, and them, are also available from the Modern Library.
Wonderland is the final novel in Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet. Joyce carol oates’s wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession.
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Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art

Sublime and ridiculous, sentimental and searing, Christmas at The New Yorker is a gift of great writing and drawing by literary legends and laugh-out-loud cartoonists. Here, too, are S. B. From jazz age to New Age, E. Here are seasonal stories, how he would god-rest those merry gentlemen, poems, ” about an elevator operator in a park avenue apartment building who experiences the fickle power of charity; john updike’s “The Carol Sing, how he would boom out when the male voices became King Wenceslas”; and Richard Ford’s acerbic and elegiac 1998 story “Crèche, ” in which a group of small-town carolers remember an exceptionally enthusiastic fellow singer “How he would jubilate, including such classics as John Cheever’s 1949 story “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor, and more, memoirs, ” in which an unmarried Hollywood lawyer spends an unsettling holiday with her sister’ s estranged husband and kids.
Perelman’s 1936 “waiting for santy, ” a playlet in the style of clifford odets labor drama the setting: “the sweatshop of Santa Claus, North Pole”, and Vladimir Nabokov’s heartbreaking 1975 story “Christ-mas, ” in which a father grieving for his lost son in a world “ghastly with sadness” sees a tiny miracle on Christmas Eve.
And it wouldn’t be christmas—or the new yorker—without dozens of covers and cartoons by Addams, or the mischievous verse of Roger Angell, Arno, Calvin Trillin, and others, Chast, and Ogden Nash “Do you know Mrs.