The Station Master's Wife


Book Description

Follow the historical changes, events and scandals that the railroad brought to Southern Oregon in the late 1880s-1920s through the life story of a pioneer woman. Alice was a woman of exceptional resourcefulness and perseverance, reveals her story in the face of upheaval, betrayal, and divorce, always supported by the deep love of her family.




The Master's Wife


Book Description




A Good Wife


Book Description

Despite facing years of abuse after arriving in Canada as a teenage bride in a hastily arranged marriage, nothing could stop Samra Zafar from pursuing her dreams At fifteen, Samra Zafar lives with her family in Pakistan and has big dreams: she will go to university and forge her own path in the world. Then, with almost no warning, her dreams evaporate when her parents arrange her marriage to a stranger in Canada. Her new husband and his family promise that the marriage and the move will be a fulfillment of her dreams. But as the walls of Zafar’s new home slowly become a prison, she realizes how deeply she has been betrayed. Desperate to get out and refusing to give up, she hatches an escape plan for herself and her two daughters. Somehow, she finds the strength to not only build a new future, but also to walk away from her past, ignoring the pleas of her family and risking cultural isolation by divorcing her husband. A Good Wife tells Zafar’s harrowing and inspiring story, following her from a young girl with big dreams to a woman who finds strength in the face of oppression and battles through to empowerment.




"Women Forget that Men are the Masters"


Book Description

A study about conflicts between men and women in contemporary Kisii, Kenya. The author argues that male identity, sense of worth and prestige have been more deeply affected by socio-economic change than that of female identity. The study emphasizes the need to examine in depth changing African social contexts within collapsing traditional structures.




The Headmaster's Wife


Book Description

An immensely talented writer whose work has been described as "incandescent" (Kirkus) and "poetic" (Booklist), Thomas Christopher Greene pens a haunting and deeply affecting portrait of one couple at their best and worst. Inspired by a personal loss, Greene explores the way that tragedy and time assail one man's memories of his life and loves. Like his father before him, Arthur Winthrop is the Headmaster of Vermont's elite Lancaster School. It is the place he feels has given him his life, but is also the site of his undoing as events spiral out of his control. Found wandering naked in Central Park, he begins to tell his story to the police, but his memories collide into one another, and the true nature of things, a narrative of love, of marriage, of family and of a tragedy Arthur does not know how to address emerges. Luminous and atmospheric, bringing to life the tight-knit enclave of a quintessential New England boarding school, the novel is part mystery, part love story and an exploration of the ties of place and family. Beautifully written and compulsively readable, The Headmaster's Wife stands as a moving elegy to the power of love as an antidote to grief. "A truly remarkable novel, I read the second half of The Headmaster's Wife with my mouth open, my jaw having dropped at the end of the first half. Thomas Christopher Greene knows how to hook a reader and land him." --Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls "An accomplished and artful storyteller, Greene has surprises in store as he unspools a plot that becomes as poignant as it is unpredictable." --Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed "Greene's genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov's classic, Lolita, and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn's contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012)." --Booklist




Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife


Book Description

In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic. Like Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll before him, Gass uses a variety of visual devices: photographs, comic-strip balloons, different typefaces, parallel story lines (sometimes three or four to the page), even coffee stains. As Larry McCaffery has pointed out, "the lonesome lady of the book's title, who is gradually revealed to be lady language herself, creates an elaborate series of devices which she hopes will draw attention to her slighted charms [and] force the reader to confront what she literally is: a physically exciting literary text."




The Tiger's Wife


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The instant classic debut novel from the author of Inland and The Morningside, hailed as “a thrilling beginning to what will certainly be a great literary career” (Elle) “Spectacular . . . [Téa Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop.”—Entertainment Weekly “Not since Zadie Smith has a young writer arrived with such power and grace.”—Time ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times; Entertainment Weekly; The Christian Science Monitor; The Kansas City Star; Library Journal In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife. Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, hailed by Colum McCann as “the most thrilling literary discovery in years,” has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Economist, Vogue, Slate, Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, Dayton Daily News, Publishers Weekly, Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered




Anyan's Story


Book Description

Anyan was born in the mid-1920s into the pre-metal culture of the Tairora of what is now called Papua New Guinea. Her early life was rooted in the traditions of her remote village, where she worked the land and took part in the rituals connected with raising food, but she lived at the time of first contact between her people and those from "outside" and she saw the traditional ways begin to change. At her marriage she moved to the government station at Kainantu, where she was exposed to more Western influences, even as she tried to hold on to her past and her ties to her village. Before she died in the mid-1970s, this woman of indomitable spirit rode in an airplane and voted in a Western-style election. When Virginia Watson began her anthropological fieldwork in the eastern highlands of New Guinea in 1954, she needed an interpreter for the unwritten language of the Tairora. Fortune sent her Anyan. In their work together as Watson researched the role of Tairora women, Anyan gradually painted a picture of her society using events from her own life. Over many years of collaboration and deepening friendship a remarkable life history was told, one that bridged the periods before and after contact with Western culture. When Watson suggested the book to Anyan, "she was elated. She was anxious that everyone know about Tairora. Her pride in her upbringing, in her culture, in her beautiful corner of the world, was apparent." Individuals experience the shock of cultural transplantation in many ways. As Watson writes, "some of those forced to make the move from one culture to another were consumed by it, and some were consigned to straddling the dark void that the cultural disparities created. Others, like Anyan, were able to maintain equilibrium in both cultures." Anyan's Story will be of interest to anthropologists and other social scientists. It is a valuable study of gender roles, women's experience in cross-cultural societies, and culture shock.




The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife


Book Description

As his letters attest, for nearly forty years Henry James enjoyed a warm and gratifying friendship with Britain's foremost soldier of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and his wife. The Wolseleys were notable figures. Lord Wolseley, the field marshal who became Britain's commander in chief of the British army, was a national hero. Both a bibliophile and an author, Wolseley was described by Henry James to his brother William as an "excellent example of the cultivated British soldier." Lady Wolseley was also well-read, as well as stylish, strong-willed, and shrewd, and in Henry's view, a delightful correspondent--in short, as the editor writes, "precisely the kind of woman James most admired." In The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife, Alan James offers a collection of more than one hundred letters--most of them published here for the first time--that Henry James wrote to the Wolseleys, the majority to Lady Wolseley. Included are an overall introduction to the letters; separate introductory profiles of Lord and Lady Wolseley along with commentaries on the factors that drew James and the Wolseleys together; introductions to each of four sections of the letters, divided chronologically; and annotations throughout, identifying the notable men and women to whom James refers as well as comparing what James and the Wolseleys thought of them and their work.




The Emancipator's Wife


Book Description

As a girl growing up in Kentucky, she lived a sheltered, privileged life filled with picnics and plantation balls. Vivacious, impulsive, and intoxicated by politics, she is a Todd of Lexington, an aristocratic family whose ancestors defeated the British. But no one knows her secret fears and anxieties. Although she is courted by the most eligible suitors in the land, including future senator Stephen Douglas, it is a gangly lawyer from Illinois who captures her heart. After a stormy courtship and a broken engagement, Abraham Lincoln will marry twenty-four-year-old Mary Todd and give her a ring inscribed with the words “Love Is Eternal.” But their happiness won’t last nearly so long. Their first child will be born under the gathering clouds of a civil war, and three more follow. As Lincoln’s star rises, the pleasure-loving Mary learns, often the hard way, the rules of being a politician’s wife. But by the time the fiery storm of war passes, tragedy will have claimed two sons, scandal will shadow her days as First Lady, and an assassin’s bullet will take Lincoln himself, leaving Mary alone and all but forgotten by the nation that owed her husband its survival. Yet it is in the years to come that Mary Todd Lincoln will truly come into her own. In public, she will fight to preserve Lincoln’s memory even as she battles a bitterly contested insanity trial. In private, she will struggle with depression and addiction as she endures the betrayals–both real and imagined–of family and friends. With a gifted novelist’s imagination and a historian’s eye for detail, Barbara Hambly tells a story of astonishing scope, richly peopled with real-life characters and their fictional counterparts, a tour-de-force tale of power, politics, and the role of women in nineteenth- century America. The result is a Mary Todd Lincoln few have seen and none will forget–the fascinating, controversial woman of whom her husband could say: “My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl and I fell in love with her; and what is more, I have never fallen out”–Mary Todd, the woman who loved Abraham Lincoln.