The Falling Woman


Book Description

“This is the kind of novel I like best . . . Great writing, great plotting, and a thoughtful plumbing of what makes us human.” —B. A. Shapiro, bestselling author of The Art Forger and The Collector’s Apprentice First, it’s just a barely believable rumor: one person may have survived the midair explosion of a passenger jet on a cross-country course from Washington, DC, to San Francisco. But soon she becomes a national media sensation when “the Falling Woman,” as the press dubs her, is said to have been taken to a Wichita hospital—and then to have disappeared without a trace. As a dedicated National Transportation Safety Board agent joins the search for clues, he becomes drawn into the woman’s moving and personal fight to keep secret the story of her survival, even from her own family, and possibly at risk to his own career. The Falling Woman is a novel that asks compelling and controversial questions about the value of life and what should be sacrificed in the name of love.




The Falling Woman


Book Description

Winner of the Nebula Award: “A lovely and literate exploration of the dark moment where myth and science meet” (Samuel R. Delany). When night falls over the Yucatan, the archaeologists lay down their tools. But while her colleagues relax, Elizabeth Butler searches for shadows. A famous scientist with a reputation for eccentricity, she carries a strange secret. Where others see nothing but dirt and bones and fragments of pottery, Elizabeth sees shades of the men and women who walked this ground thousands of years before. She can speak to the past—and the past is beginning to speak back. As Elizabeth communes with ghosts, the daughter she abandoned flies to Mexico hoping for a reunion. She finds a mother embroiled in the supernatural, on a quest for the true reason for the Mayans’ disappearance. To dig up the truth, the archaeologist who talks to the dead must learn a far more difficult skill: speaking to her daughter.




The Falling Woman


Book Description

Thought-provoking and heartrending, The Falling Woman resonates long after the book has closed and is a collection to read again and again. Shaena Lambert’s remarkable debut short story collection, part of our new Vintage Tales series, examines the universal themes of love, loss and healing. All ten stories, whether they are set in the dry, sage-covered hills of the Okanagan or on the serenely polluted shores of Lake Ontario, are linked thematically by an archetypal icon: the falling woman. She rushes through the air upside down, transformed by what she has seen, or is about to recognize. Never quite fallen — always in transition — she insists on plunging into the forbidden: marching down Main Street topless; seducing married men; exploring the shadowy losses that predate her birth but still manage to stamp her being. Shaena Lambert’s perceptive eye and flair for evocative and sensual prose bring the under-surface of relationships — between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives — to brilliant light.




Confessions of a Falling Woman


Book Description

This collection of short stories by Debra Dean, author of the critically acclaimed novel 'The Madonnas of Leningrad', explores turning points in lives on the brink of change. Each of the characters she brings to vivid life in these pages is either facing up to, or coming to terms with, a significant moment in their lives.




The Art of Falling


Book Description

In this “delicate slow burn of a novel” (Jan Carson), a woman’s marriage and career are threatened by an old indiscretion just as she receives the opportunity of a lifetime—from the award–winning author of the “extraordinary” (Colum McCann) Dinosaurs on Other Planets. Nessa McCormack’s marriage is coming back together again after her husband’s affair. She is excited to be in charge of a retrospective art exhibition for a beloved artist, the renowned late sculptor Robert Locke. But the arrival of two enigmatic outsiders imperils both her personal and professional worlds: A chance encounter with an old friend threatens to expose a betrayal Nessa thought she had long put behind her; and at work, an odd woman comes forward with a mysterious connection to Robert Locke’s life and his most famous work, the Chalk Sculpture. As Nessa finds the past intruding on the present, she realizes she must decide what is the truth, whether she can continue to live with a lie, and what the consequences might be were she to fully unravel the mysteries in both the life of Robert Locke and her own. In this gripping and wonderfully written debut, Danielle McLaughlin reveals profound truths about love, power, and the secrets that define us.




Falling


Book Description

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Terrifying…buckle up for a chilling summer read.” —People (Best Books of the Week) “The perfect thriller! A must-read.” —Gillian Flynn “Stunning and relentless. This is Jaws at 35,000 feet.” —Don Winslow You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight.




Falling Women and Other Stories


Book Description

Award-winning short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son. Braxton, North Carolina is the where in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton's babysitters are dangerous, snooping, stealing secrets - and husbands. But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend. "The World As I Know It" won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize; "The Yellow Sneakers" won a Dexter Review Short Story Prize; "Jazzland" won the Lip Service Prose Prize; and an earlier version of "Falling Women" won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship for Ms. Herbert.




Sky Woman Falling


Book Description

She’s an FBI Special Agent and Modoc Indian. He’s a Bureau of Indian Affairs Investigator and Comanche. Together, Anna Turnipseed and Emmett Parker have proven to be “a memorable literary pair” (Publishers Weekly). Now, they’re called upon to tackle a case thousands of miles from their home-sweet-home on the range... On the New York reservation of the Oneida, the team finds the broken body of Brenda Two Kettles, a community elder, in a cornfield. From what Turnipseed and Parker can see, she wasn’t attacked. Instead, it seems Ms. Two Kettles—much like the woman in the Oneida creation myth—simply fell out of sky. But it’s a land dispute that has claimed Ms. Two Kettles’ life—one that threatens to ground Turnipseed and Parker in facts far stranger than fiction...




Skye Falling


Book Description

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • A woman who’s used to going solo discovers that there’s one relationship she can’t run away from in this “hilarious, electric” (The New York Times) novel, a probing examination of the complexities of family, queerness, race, and community LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER• ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, Autostraddle, Shondaland • “A new kind of love story, the best kind.”—Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter When she was twenty-six and broke, Skye didn’t think twice before selling her eggs and happily pocketing the cash. Now approaching forty, Skye still moves through life entirely—and unrepentantly—on her own terms, living out of a suitcase and avoiding all manner of serious relationships. Maybe her junior high classmates weren’t wrong when they voted her “Most Likely to Be Single” instead of “Most Ride-or-Die Homie,” but at least she’s always been free to do as she pleases. Then a twelve-year-old girl tracks Skye down during one of her brief visits to her hometown of Philadelphia and informs Skye that she’s “her egg.” Skye’s life is thrown into sharp relief and she decides that it might be time to actually try to have a meaningful relationship with another human being. Spoiler alert: It’s not easy. Things get even more complicated when Skye realizes that the woman she tried and failed to pick up the other day is the girl’s aunt, and now it’s awkward. All the while, her brother is trying to get in touch, her mother is being bewilderingly kind, and the West Philly pool halls and hoagie shops of her youth have been replaced by hipster cafés. With its endearingly prickly narrator and a cast of characters willing to both challenge her and catch her when she falls, this novel is a clever, moving portrait of a woman and the relationships she thought she could live without.




An Unnecessary Woman


Book Description

A happily misanthropic Middle East divorcee finds refuge in books in a “beautiful and absorbing” novel of late-life crisis (The New York Times). Aaliya is a divorced, childless, and reclusively cranky translator in Beirut nurturing doubts about her latest project: a 900-page avant-garde, linguistically serpentine historiography by a late Chilean existentialist. Honestly, at seventy-two, should she be taking on such a project? Not that Aailiya fears dying. Women in her family live long; her mother is still going crazy. But on this lonely day, hour-by-hour, Aaliya’s musings on literature, philosophy, her career, and her aging body, are suddenly invaded by memories of her volatile past. As she tries in vain to ward off these emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left. In this “meditation on, among other things, aging, politics, literature, loneliness, grief and resilience” (The New York Times), Alameddine conjures “a beguiling narrator . . . who is, like her city, hard to read, hard to take, hard to know and, ultimately, passionately complex” (San Francisco Chronicle). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, An Unnecessary Woman is “a fun, and often funny . . . grave, powerful . . . [and] extraordinary” Washington Independent Review of Books) ode to literature and its power to define who we are. “Read it once, read it twice, read other books for a decade or so, and then pick it up and read it anew. This one’s a keeper” (The Independent)