The Bigamist


Book Description

In April 2006, Mary Turner Thomson received a call that blew her life apart. The woman on the other end of the line told her that Will Jordan, Mary's husband and the father of her two younger children, had been married to her for fourteen years and they had five children together. The Bigamist is the shocking true story of how one man manipulated an intelligent, independent woman, conning her out of £200,000 and leaving her to bring up the children he claimed he could never have. It's a story we all think could never happen to us, but this shameless con man has been doing the same thing to various other women for at least 27 years, spinning a tangled web of lies and deceit to cover his tracks. How far would you go to help the man you love? How far would he go to deceive you? And what would you do when you found out it was all a lie?




A Bigamist's Daughter


Book Description

Alice McDermott's brilliant first novel 'One of our finest novelists at work today' LA TIMES 'There's no one like Alice McDermott ... her touch is light as a feather, her perceptions purely accurate' ELLE Elizabeth Connelly sits in a New York office that looks like a real editor's, but isn't quite. Employed at a vanity press, Elizabeth watches the real world - of real struggles, passion, pain and love - spin around her. Until one day, a young writer comes to her with a novel about a man who loves more than one woman at once. And suddenly Elizabeth will be awakened from her young urban professional slumber - by a man's real touch and by a real story in search of an ending. This is a luminous novel of memory, revelation and desire.




Silver Sparrow


Book Description

*THE BESTSELLING RICHARD & JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK* From the award-winning author of An American Marriage comes this breathtaking tale of a sisterhood defined by a father's secret, perfect for fans of Brit Bennett and Yaa Gyasi 'MY FATHER, JAMES WITHERSPOON, IS A BIGAMIST.' SECRETS Dana and Chaurisse are sisters who have never met. The only thing binding them together is the life-changing secret of their father's double life. LIES Only one of them knows the truth about James and his hidden family. When the girls do finally meet and become friends, the fragile promise that has kept his secrets safe for so long threatens to implode. HOPE This soulful story of friendship and sisterhood paints an unforgettable picture of the messy knots that bind families together, from the author of modern classic, An American Marriage. AN OBSERVER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A GUARDIAN 'BEST BOOK OF 2020 TO SUPPORT INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS' * A BOOKSELLER SMALL PUBLISHERS 2020 TOP 20 'Do not miss this can’t-actually-stop-reading-it novel from the author of the Women's Prize for Fiction-winning An American Marriage.' Stylist




Shattered Dreams


Book Description

Irene Spencer did as she felt God commanded in marrying her brother-in-law Verlan LeBaron, becoming his second wife. When the government raided the fundamentalist, polygamous Mormon village of Short Creek, Arizona, Irene and her family fled to Verlan's brothers' Mexican ranch. They lived in squalor and desolate conditions in the Mexican desert with Verlan's six brothers, one sister, and numerous wives and children. Readers will be appalled and astonished, but most amazingly, greatly inspired. Irene's dramatic story reveals how far religion can be stretched and abused and how one woman and her children found their way out, into truth and redemption.




After This


Book Description

Alice McDermott's powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother, Jacob, lags behind, until he finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Clare, the youngest child of their aging parents, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. After This, alive with the passions and tragedies of a determining era in our history, portrays the clash of traditional, faith-bound life and modern freedom, while also capturing, with McDermott's inimitable understanding and grace, the joy, sorrow, anger, and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.




Favorite Wife


Book Description

A riveting memoir of life inside one of North America's most notorious polygamous cults.




The Summer We Fell Apart


Book Description

The children of a once-brilliant playwright and a struggling actress, the four Haas siblings grew up in chaos—raised in an environment composed of neglect and glamour in equal measure. When their father dies, they must depend on their intense but fragile bond to remember what it means to be family despite years of anger and hurt. These brothers and sisters are painfully human, sometimes selfish, and almost always making the wrong decisions, but their endearing struggles provide laughter through tears—something anyone who's ever had a sibling can relate to.




Christianity, Colonization, and Gender Relations in North Sumatra


Book Description

In this book Sita van Bemmelen offers an account of changes in Toba Batak society (Sumatra, Indonesia) due to Christianity and Dutch colonial rule (1861-1942) with a focus on customs and customary law related to the life cycle and gender relations. The first part, a historical ethnography, describes them as they existed at the onset of colonial rule. The second part zooms in on the negotiations between the Toba Batak elite, the missionaries of the German Rhenish Mission and colonial administrators about these customs showing the evolving views on desirable modernity of each contestant. The pillars of the Toba patrilineal kinship system were challenged, but alterations changed the way it was reproduced and gender relations for ever.




Lives of the Bigamists


Book Description

Boyer lets these Mexican people speak for themselves about how they got into trouble with the Inquisition.




Marriage in Ireland, 1660–1925


Book Description

What were the laws on marriage in Ireland, and did church and state differ in their interpretation? How did men and women meet and arrange to marry? How important was patriarchy and a husband's control over his wife? And what were the options available to Irish men and women who wished to leave an unhappy marriage? This first comprehensive history of marriage in Ireland across three centuries looks below the level of elite society for a multi-faceted exploration of how marriage was perceived, negotiated and controlled by the church and state, as well as by individual men and women within Irish society. Making extensive use of new and under-utilised primary sources, Maria Luddy and Mary O'Dowd explain the laws and customs around marriage in Ireland. Revising current understandings of marital law and relations, Marriage in Ireland, 1660–1925 represents a major new contribution to Irish historical studies.