Category: Fiction

Jeannette Haien’s exquisite, beloved first novel is a deceptively simple story that has the power and resonance of myth. The story begins on a rainy morning as Father Declan de Loughry stands fishing in an Irish salmon stream, pondering the recent deathbed confession of one of his parishioners. Kevin Dennehy and his wife, Enda, have been sweetly living a lie for some 50 years, a lie the full extent of which Father Declan learns only when Enda finally confides “the all of it.” Her tale of suffering mesmerizes the priest, who recognizes that it is also a tale of sin and scandal, a transgression he cannot ignore. The resolution of his dilemma is a triumph of strength and empathy that, as Benedict Kiely has said, makes The All of It “a book to remember”.

( from the sleeve,   145 pages )

Set in the late 1950s, this is the story of Evelyn Hall, an English professor, who goes to Reno to obtain a divorce and put an end to her disastrous 16-year marriage. While staying at a boarding house to establish her six-week residency requirement she meets Ann Childs, a casino worker and fifteen years her junior. Physically, they are remarkably alike and eventually have an affair and begin the struggle to figure out just how a relationship between two women can last. Desert of the Heart examines the conflict between convention and freedom and the ways in which the characters try to resolve the conflict.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   224 pages )

In this fluid, often witty novel set on a small rural island off the coast of Vancouver, five solitary women at different stages in life learn how to function alone as well as together. Canadian-Japanese Karen, who has left her lesbian lover of eight years, befriends Red, a young woman with an unknown background who cleans houses for three others–acrid Milly, divorced by her husband after a 20-year marriage; Henrietta, whose husband is institutionalized in Vancouver; and Miss James, an eccentric, elderly spinster. Birth, illness and death follow one another, uniting the five independent and incisively drawn protagonists. “All that time I was trying to teach you how to live alone and really take care of yourself, I was teaching myself, too,” Henrietta tells Red. The resulting warmth is not saccharine but realistic, as Rule illuminates the vagaries and pain of abandonment and loss, and the fragile joy of new bonds.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   238 pages )

In this superb novel by the beloved author of Talk Before Sleep, The Pull of the Moon, and Until the Real Thing Comes Along, a woman re-creates her life after divorce by opening up her house and her heart.
Samantha’s husband has left her, and after a spree of overcharging at Tiffany’s, she settles down to reconstruct a life for herself and her eleven-year-old son. Her eccentric mother tries to help by fixing her up with dates, but a more pressing problem is money. To meet her mortgage payments, Sam decides to take in boarders. The first is an older woman who offers sage advice and sorely needed comfort; the second, a maladjusted student, is not quite so helpful. A new friend, King, an untraditional man, suggests that Samantha get out, get going, get work. But her real work is this: In order to emerge from grief and the past, she has to learn how to make her own happiness. In order to really see people, she has to look within her heart. And in order to know who she is, she has to remember–and reclaim–the person she used to be, long before she became someone else in an effort to save her marriage. Open House is a love story about what can blossom between a man and a woman, and within a woman herself.

( from the Hardcover edition )

A writer as wise and humane as Betts should be a household name. It’s been a decade since her last novel, the poignant and funny Heading West , and in that time her eye for human frailty has grown both sharper and more compassionate. Here she chronicles a family in crisis and pain as a child battles a serious illness, yet, as always, her ironic insight and natural wit enliven the tale. Still clearing the emotional debris left after his selfish, narcissistic wife, Christine, decamped three years earlier, North Carolina state trooper Frank Thompson is lovingly raising their 12-year-old daughter, Mary Grace. Mary is a typical adolescent, masking her insecurities with a nonchalant air. When she becomes obsessed with horses, Frank begins a romance with her young riding instructor, but the balance of all their lives goes askew when Mary develops kidney disease. Medication and dialysis fail, a kidney transplant is indicated and Christine, the only possible donor, shows her true colors. As always, Betts’s characters are ordinary people etched in indelible detail; Frank Thompson’s love for his daughter is rendered achingly real, and the feckless Christine and the grandparents on both sides are at once idiosyncratic and resoundingly believable. While yearning for her absent mother, Mary acquires a stoic acceptance of her illness and a deeper understanding of the inequities of life, filtered through a youngster’s misperceptions and fantasies. Betts does not settle for sentimental, easy answers in this deeply moving tale.

( Courtesy of Publishers Weekly,   339 pages )