Love and Other Impossible Pursuits


Book Description

In this moving, wry, and candid novel, widely acclaimed novelist Ayelet Waldman takes us through one woman’s passage through love, loss, and the strange absurdities of modern life.Emilia Greenleaf believed that she had found her soulmate, the man she was meant to spend her life with. But life seems a lot less rosy when Emilia has to deal with the most neurotic and sheltered five-year-old in New York City: her new stepson William. Now Emilia finds herself trying to flag down taxis with a giant, industrial-strength car seat, looking for perfect, strawberry-flavored, lactose-free cupcakes, receiving corrections on her French pronunciation from her supercilious stepson – and attempting to find balance in a new family that’s both larger, and smaller, than she bargained for. In Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Ayelet Waldman has created a novel rich with humor and truth, perfectly characterizing one woman’s search for answers in a crazily uncertain world.




Love and Treasure


Book Description

A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure weaves a tale around the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War. In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman—a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life. A story of brilliantly drawn characters—a suave and shady art historian, a delusive and infatuated Freudian, a family of singing circus dwarfs fallen into the clutches of Josef Mengele, and desperate lovers facing choices that will tear them apart—Love and Treasure is Ayelet Waldman’s finest novel to date: a sad, funny, richly detailed work that poses hard questions about the value of precious things in a time when life itself has no value, and about the slenderest of chains that can bind us to the griefs and passions of the past. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.




Red Hook Road


Book Description

Traces the lives of the Tetherly and Copaken families in the aftermath of a child's tragic death, which results in a broken marriage, a bonding between bereaved siblings and healing in the form of an adopted girl's prodigious violin talent. By the author of the best-selling Bad Mother.




Bad Mother


Book Description

In our mothers’ day there were good mothers, indifferent mothers, and occasionally, great mothers. Today we have only Bad Mothers: If you work, you’re neglectful; if you stay home, you’re smothering. If you discipline, you’re buying them a spot on the shrink’s couch; if you let them run wild, they will be into drugs by seventh grade. Is it any wonder so many women refer to themselves at one time or another as a “bad mother”? Writing with remarkable candor, and dispensing much hilarious and helpful advice along the way—Is breast best? What should you do when your daughter dresses up as a “ho” for Halloween?—Ayelet Waldman says it's time for women to get over it and get on with it in this wry, unflinchingly honest, and always insightful memoir on modern motherhood.




Inside This Place, Not of It


Book Description

“Essential reading” on some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States (Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black) Here, in their own words, thirteen women recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their harrowing struggle for survival once insides. Among the narrators: Theresa, who spent years believing her health and life were in danger, being aggressively treated with a variety of medications for a disease she never had. Only on her release did she discover that an incompetent prison medical bureaucracy had misdiagnosed her with HIV. Anna, who repeatedly warned apathetic prison guards about a suicidal cellmate. When the woman killed herself, the guards punished Anna in an attempt to silence her and hide their own negligence. Teri, who was sentenced to up to fifty years for aiding and abetting a robbery when she was only seventeen. A prison guard raped Teri, who was still a teenager, and the assaults continued for years with the complicity of other staff.




Daughter's Keeper


Book Description

How much would you sacrifice to save someone you love? When Olivia, wild-haired and headstrong, makes a terrible mistake, she must turn to the person least likely to help--her mother, Elaine. Motherhood was a role that Elaine never embraced and her best never amounted to much. But now Olivia faces prosecution for a naïve connection to a drug deal and she needs Elaine more than ever. As the days count down and Olivia's future hangs in the balance, Elaine must decide just how much she is willing to give for a second chance with her daughter. With Daughter's Keeper, Ayelet Waldman has crafted a redemptive journey at once highly emotional and unbearably suspenseful, as Olivia and Elaine's struggle builds to a beautiful, heart-wrenching climax. In this luminous, gripping novel, Waldman brings to life the tensions and the tenderness that forge the unshakeable bond between parent and child. Daughter's Keeper reveals the unlimited boundaries of forgiveness and the sacrifices we make for love. "A powerhouse novel of complex emotions so compelling that when I finished the book, I started over again."--Amy Tan "In Daughter's Keeper, Ayelet Waldman shows that the power of love, even when prickling with thorns, can ultimately provide what the criminal system cannot: a hard-fought, hard-won second chance."--Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil "Waldman's passion and affection for her characters shine through."--Publishers Weekly "Waldman has written Daughter's Keeper with enough intelligence, tenderness and craft to shape outrage into a story that is both moving and enthralling." --Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity! "Ayelet Waldman has brought the war on drugs home, and has shown us just how close to home it can come....She looks past headlines and into the heart. What she finds there is hope for us all." --Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina




A Really Good Day


Book Description

"In an effort to treat a debilitating mood disorder, Ayelet Waldman undertook a very private experiment, ingesting 10 micrograms of LSD every three days for a month. This is the story--by turns revealing, courageous, fascinating and funny--of her quietly psychedelic spring, her quest to understand one of our most feared drugs, and her search for a really good day"--




Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits


Book Description

“A dream of a debut, by turns troubling and glorious, angry and wise.” —Junot Diaz​ Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, the debut of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Laila Lalami, evokes the grit and enduring grace that is modern Morocco. The book begins as four Moroccans illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar in an inflatable boat headed for Spain.What has driven them to risk their lives? And will the rewards prove to be worth the danger? There’s Murad, a gentle, unemployed man who’s been reduced to hustling tourists around Tangier; Halima, who’s fleeing her drunken husband and the slums of Casablanca; Aziz, who must leave behind his devoted wife in hope of securing work in Spain; and Faten, a student and religious fanatic whose faith is at odds with an influential man determined to destroy her future. Sensitively written with beauty and boldness, this is a gripping book about what propels people to risk their lives in search of a better future.




Particulate Matter


Book Description

In concise and distilled prose, Lemus presents a collection of still lifes, landscapes, and portraits of a challenging year that threatened all she loved most. “A love story that’s profoundly rooted in the emotional, geographical, and sociopolitical terrain of today . . . Like song lyrics or snapshots, her wisps and fragments of language take on a coded and otherworldly atmosphere, one that conveys wonder and dread almost subliminally . . . Particulate Matter is a moving example of how to write about climate change, not didactically, but with the deep impact of both personal loss and literary elegance.” —NPR Books “A tiny, powerful flame of a book. Lemus’ writing lands like sparks and ash, fragmented and tinged with grief . . . Particulate Matter is . . . an exploration of the simultaneity of delight, yearning, grief and confusion of being in love with a person and a place. Of being alive at all.” —San Francisco Chronicle Particulate Matter is the story of a year in Felicia Luna Lemus’s marriage when the world turned upside down. It’s set in Los Angeles, and it’s about love and crisis, loss and grief, the city and the ocean, ancestral ghosts and history haunting. Nature herself seemed to howl. Fires raged and covered the house Lemus and her spouse shared in ash. Everything crystallized. It was the most challenging and terrifying time she had ever experienced, and yet it was also a time when the sublime beauty of the everyday shone through with particular power and presence.




The Big Nap


Book Description

Smart, witty mystery from the author of Bad Mother and Love and Treasure...“Juliet Applebaum is smart, fearless, and completely candid about life as a full-time mom with a penchant for part-time detective work.”—Sue Grafton Ever since her four-month-old son was born, Juliet hasn’t slept for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. (Has she given birth to some sort of mutant vampire? She’s beginning to wonder.) It’s been ages since she took her three-year-old daughter to the park. (Just one more reason why she’s a front-runner for the “Worst Mother of the Year” award.) Her workaholic husband is spending way too much time with his perky, oh-so-pretty producing partner. (Juliet’s sure her own post-pregnancy pounds are at least partly to blame.) She’s started answering the door topless. (Don’t even ask.) And now her son’s babysitter—a beautiful young Chasidic woman—has vanished. Juliet can’t help wondering if Fraydle was fleeing something even scarier than her screaming, squalling charge. Like her upcoming arranged marriage, maybe? It’s certainly possible. Especially since Juliet saw her furtively chatting with a non-Chasidic man shortly before she disappeared. Or perhaps something much more sinister has occurred. Why else would Fraydle’s family be so reluctant to call in the police? To find out the truth, Juliet, with her over-tired kids in tow, will have to travel from her havoc-filled home in Los Angeles to a Chasidic encalve in Brooklyn. In search of answers. In pursuit of justice. And in desperate need of a big, long nap… Ayelet Waldman is the author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits and other acclaimed works of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as the Mommy-Track Mysteries, including such titles as Nursery Crimes and A Playdate with Death.