13, rue Therese by Elena Mauli Shapiro
In Paris, American academic Trevor Stratton discovers a box full of century-old artifacts. The pictures, letters and objects in the box relate to the life of Louise Brunet, a Frenchwoman who lived through both World Wars. As he becomes enamored with the charming, feisty Louise of his imagination, he notices another alluring Frenchwoman, his clerk Josianne, with whom he decides he is falling in love.
The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett
In the fall of 1916, America prepares for war—but in the community of Tamarack Lake, the focus is on the sick. Wealthy tubercular patients live in private cure cottages; charity patients, mainly immigrants, fill the large public sanatorium. But when the well-meaning efforts of one enterprising patient lead to a tragic accident and a terrible betrayal, the war comes home.
Ali and Nino by Kurban Said
Out of print for nearly three decades until the hardcover re-release last year, Ali and Nino is Kurban Said's masterpiece. It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war.
Alice in Exile: A Novel by Piers Paul Read
It is 1913 when Alice meets Edward Cobb, the eligible son of a baronet. When Alice's father, a radical publisher, gets involved in a scandal, Edward breaks off their engagement, unaware that Alice is expecting his child. Desperate, she travels to Russia to serve as a governess for charming Baron Rettenberg, as the Russian Revolution and World War I rage on.
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient.
C by Tom McCarthy
Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of Serge Carrefax. As Serge goes from a Bohemian spa to the skies of World War I, and from a German prison camp into the tombs of Egypt, we follow his life through the tumultuous course of the nascent modern era.
The Crimson Portrait by Jody Shields
Spring 1915. On a sprawling country estate not far from London a young woman mourns her husband, fallen on the battlefields of what has been declared the first World War...
But the isolated and eerie stillness in which she grieves is shattered when her home is transformed into a bustling military hospital to serve the war's most irreparably injured.
A Cup of Tea by Amy Ephron
Rosemary Fell was born into privilege. She has wealth, well–connected friends, and a handsome fiance, Philip Alsop. Finally she has everything she wants. It is then, in a moment of beneficence, that Rosemary invites Eleanor Smith into her home for a cup of tea. This leads to a tempestuous and all–consuming love triangle –– until the tides of war throw all their lives off balance.
Fall of Giants: Book One of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett
Fall of Giants is Ken Follett’s magnificent historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families --- America, German, Russian, English, and Welsh --- as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage.
Life Class by Pat Barker
In the spring of 1914, a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by a fellow student, Elinor Brooke. By the time he returns from World War I, Paul must confront not only the overwhelming, perhaps impossible challenge of how to express all that he has seen, but also the fact that life, and love, will never be the same for him again.
My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young
The lives of two very different couples are irrevocably intertwined and forever changed in this stunning World War I epic of love and war.
A Passion Most Pure: Daughters of Boston, Book 1 by Julie Lessman
Refusing to settle for anything less than a romantic relationship that pleases God, Faith O'Connor steels her heart against her desire for the roguish Collin McGuire. To further complicate matters, Faith finds herself the object of Collin's affections, even as he is courting her sister. The Great War is raging overseas, and a smaller war is brewing in the O'Connor household.
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Reviewer (text)
Before everything in her world changes forever, Maura Corrigan feels almost ecstatic and on top of the world. It is a vibrant blue-skied June morning, and she soars through it, propelled by a secret she clutches close as she walks her children to their elementary school. Maura pushes Sarah in her stroller, while calling to her eldest son James on his bike to slow down. When she feels her phone vibrate, she pulls it out of her pocket to concentrate on the text she's received, formulating various witty replies. Read More
Teaser
Life is good for Maura Corrigan. Married to her college sweetheart, Pete, raising three young kids with her parents nearby in her peaceful Chicago suburb, her world is secure. Then one day, in a single turn of fate, that entire world comes crashing down and everything that she thought she knew changes.
Promo
Life is good for Maura Corrigan. Married to her college sweetheart, Pete, raising three young kids with her parents nearby in her peaceful Chicago suburb, her world is secure. Then one day, in a single turn of fate, that entire world comes crashing down and everything that she thought she knew changes.
About the Book
A bright June day. A split-second distraction. A family forever changed.
Life is good for Maura Corrigan. Married to her college sweetheart, Pete, raising three young kids with her parents nearby in her peaceful Chicago suburb, her world is secure. Then one day, in a single turn of fate, that entire world comes crashing down and everything that she thought she knew changes.
Maura must learn to move forward with the weight of grief and the crushing guilt of an unforgivable secret. Pete senses a gap growing between him and his wife but finds it easier to escape to the bar with his friends than face the flaws in his marriage.
Meanwhile, Maura's parents are dealing with the fault lines in their own marriage. Charismatic Roger, who at 65, is still chasing the next business deal and Margaret, a pragmatic and proud homemaker, have been married for four decades, seemingly happily. But the truth is more complicated. Like Maura, Roger has secrets of his own and when his deceptions and weaknesses are exposed, Margaret's love and loyalty face the ultimate test.
THOSE WE LOVE MOST chronicles how these unforgettable characters confront their choices, examine their mistakes, fight for their most valuable relationships, and ultimately find their way back to each other. It takes us deep into the heart of what makes families and marriages tick and explores a fundamental question: when the ties that bind us to those we love are strained or broken, how do we pick up the pieces?
Deeply penetrating and brimming with emotional insight, this engrossing family drama heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
September 2012
My younger son is in his senior year, and thus September still feels like "back to the books" for me. Last night, I went to "Senior Night" where we were given marching orders on the myriad of details surrounding college applications. I have been down this road before, but I still think the level of abject anxiety in that room was pretty high. A friend once wisely told me that all we want for our children is that they are not disappointed. It's so very true.
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—San Francisco Chronicle
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