A REESE'S BOOK CLUB JULY PICKA deeply satisfying and enjoyable novel about family, secrets, ghosts and homecoming'Entrancing ... filled with mystery' Reese Witherspoon, Reese's Book Club July Picks'I could not put this book down' Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful'Compulsively readable ... funny, heartbreaking' Oprah DailyOn a secluded cliff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house that contains a century's worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned - yet there are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane, and becomes a hideaway for her, a place to escape her troubled, volatile mother.Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a magazine. Convinced that the house is haunted, Genevieve hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers - of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artefacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism - is even older than Maine itself ...
CONTRIBUTORS: J. Courtney SullivanEAN: 9780349994178COUNTRY: United KingdomPAGES: 384WEIGHT: HEIGHT: 198 cm
PUBLISHED BY: Little, Brown Book GroupDATE PUBLISHED: CITY: GENRE: FICTION / GeneralWIDTH: 126 cmSPINE:
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Fiction: general and literary
The Cliffs is a stunning achievement, and J. Courtney Sullivan's best book yet. Sullivan weaves a narrative that's fascinating and thought-provoking. I literally could not put this book down, A dilapidated lavender mansion, perched high on a craggy bluff in Maine, turns out to be more than a home: It's the key to a century of hopes, misdeeds and family ghosts, Sullivan has found the perfect heroine for her compulsively readable novel. Funny, beleaguered, heartbreaking - Jane is a woman who just wants to pull together and will do anything to make that happen. Even if means following the cryptic clues of a possibly fraudulent psychic ..., J. Courtney Sullivan is so skilled at multi-threaded narratives, and this is her most ambitious book yet. Weaving together the stories of women in Maine over centuries, this novel is about maternal loss and trauma, the idea of home, and most affecting, the stories that remain untold, Sullivan writes with her usual compassion, insight, and sensitivity ... and poses powerful questions about how to right the wrongs of the past
J. Courtney Sullivan is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, Saints For All Occasions, and Friends and Strangers. Courtney's writing has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, Elle, Glamour, Allure, Real Simple, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among many others. She is a co-editor, with Courtney Martin, of the essay anthology Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. Courtney lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children.
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A REESE'S BOOK CLUB JULY PICKA deeply satisfying and enjoyable novel about family, secrets, ghosts and homecoming'Entrancing ... filled with mystery' Reese Witherspoon, Reese's Book Club July Picks'I could not put this book down' Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful'Compulsively readable ... funny, heartbreaking' Oprah DailyOn a secluded cliff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house that contains a century's worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned - yet there are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane, and becomes a hideaway for her, a place to escape her troubled, volatile mother.Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a magazine. Convinced that the house is haunted, Genevieve hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers - of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artefacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism - is even older than Maine itself ...
CONTRIBUTORS: J. Courtney SullivanEAN: 9780349994178COUNTRY: United KingdomPAGES: 384WEIGHT: HEIGHT: 198 cm
PUBLISHED BY: Little, Brown Book GroupDATE PUBLISHED: CITY: GENRE: FICTION / GeneralWIDTH: 126 cmSPINE:
J. Courtney Sullivan is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, Saints For All Occasions, and Friends and Strangers. Courtney's writing has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, Elle, Glamour, Allure, Real Simple, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among many others. She is a co-editor, with Courtney Martin, of the essay anthology Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. Courtney lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children.
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A really fantastic look at South Africa through the eyes of three groups of South Africans. An easy , page turning novel by Lance Thorburn. Strongly recommended
Female equivalent to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
This novella is the female equivalent to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which | also enjoyed), except that this is a memoir and that was fiction. I am sure there is both truth and fiction in both versions though.
This book covers so much philosophical ground relating to our perceptions and understanding of sanity vs insanity, what is deemed normal for women vs normal for men, how we think about the brain, and the lack of communication between those who study the brain and those who study the mind. It also raises important questions about social norms and how this affects people (especially kids) whose particular personalities or ways do not fit in with the ideas of how things should be.
In many ways we have come very far, and in other ways we still have so far to go. A novella such as this, set in the late 1960's but recounted 25 odd years later, shed some light on this even as it is being read by someone who was an adolescent in the 1990's and is reading it in 2023. Will this have less of an impact if you have never been diagnosed with a mental disorder of wondered whether you were crazy? I don't know. Are there any such people? I have never met them... In my experience, almost everyone has had some way that they did not fit in with the world around them, and the only difference was how much of themselves they had to break or give up - or if they were even able to do so - in order to appear normal, or have a lifestyle that was acceptable.
If you like pondering some of our most persistent questions about being human and the societies we create while we force labels on everything, then you may find this book quite profound. It provides no answers, but it does shed some doubt on some of the answers we thought we had. And this doubt is important if we allow for the necessity to form a more inclusive society, one that does not INTERRUPT the being of those who are different and those who don't quite fit our idea of what the world should look like. Because those people are more than we think and looking at the amount of kids that are anxious and overwhelmed and depressed these days, this shift in thinking may very well be the most important thing we need to do.
This book gets a whole 5 stars because it will stay with me for quite some time, and I think I will be rereading it often.