As someone who loves my work, I’ve noticed that in fiction when a woman is successful at her career, often that career mainly functions as a source of guilt or stress. Fictional working women spend a lot of time second guessing their choices, and, hey, it is hard to balance work and family. Women are torn in multiple directions. But I also believe it’s okay to love your job. It’s okay to find joy in it and to not beat yourself up. I find deep satisfaction in writing, and I enjoy reading about characters who know the rush of doing a job well.
Set in 1980s Alabama, Family Law follows Lucia, an accomplished lawyer who’s made a name for herself at a time when a woman in a courtroom is still a rarity. She focuses her work on domestic abuse cases, messy divorces, and custody battles. When she meets Rachel, the teenage daughter of a potential client, an unlikely friendship is born – for Rachel, Lucia is proof that there are different ways of being a woman than the ones she’s been shown at home.
But Lucia’s work has put a target on her back. When threats against her start to put Rachel in danger, Lucia must decide what’s more important: the safety of those she cares about or the rights she’s spent her life fighting for. The story is a look at how we choose mothers other than the ones we’re born to, how we shape each other, and how we make a difference.
I’m a sucker for books set in the ‘80s and for books set in the future, and this book is both! You’ve got time travel and astronauts and danger, but alongside the action, Swyler has crafted beautiful, multi-layered characters. I fell in love with them all, particularly Nedda, who loves space as a child and loves it just as whole-heartedly when she’s a crew member on a spaceship.
The novel tapped into a couple of my favorite themes: 1) the bonds of parents and children and 2) what it means to do the right thing. I’m always more interested in good than evil, and these characters understand what it means to choose the greater good. A smart, powerfully written book that will make you care deeply about what happens next.
A Long Island Reads 2020 Selection * A Real Simple Best Book of 2019
From the bestselling author of The Book of Speculation, a “tender and ambitious” (Vulture) novel about time, loss, and the wonders of the universe.
Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach--if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist father she idolizes, is consumed by his own obsessions. Laid off from his job at NASA and still reeling from the loss of Nedda's newborn brother several…
Oh, this book is perfect from the first page. It captures motherhood wonderfully and specifically—in this case, mothering two teenage boys—and it just as successfully captures the Maine coast and the complicated, sometimes fragile ecosystem of a marriage.
Jill is a documentary filmmaker who’s temporarily a single parent to her boys while her husband, a fisherman, recovers in a hospital from a boating accident. There’s nothing flashy about the story—it’s a smart, lovely, often funny look at one woman’s life. It’s a deeply contented life, by the way, which means the stakes are very high when the foundation of it starts to look shaky.
This beautiful portrait of a family in a fishing village in Maine is "a fresh look at marriage, motherhood, and the wondrous inner lives of teenagers. A truly beautiful and unforgettable love story of a family on the brink” (Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers). A must-read from the critically acclaimed author of Elsey Comes Home.
“I loved Landslide. You are right there with them in a fishing village in Maine, feeling the wind, the sea, the danger. Smart, honest, and funny, this is a story you won't forget.” —Judy Blume, best-selling author of In the Unlikely Event
If you’d told me it was possible, I wouldn’t have believed you—Lily King’s written a novel where the love story you care most about is the one between a writer and her unpublished novel. If you’re a writer, you should read this. If you’ve ever loved a thing past all logic and reason, if you stayed up past midnight to get in a few more minutes or a few more hours plugging away at it—if you have a passion—you should read this.
If you love stunning sentences and paragraphs that leave you staring into space, mesmerized, read it.
#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick A New York Times Book Review’s Group Text Selection
"I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph... The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." —Curtis Sittenfeld
An extraordinary new novel of art, love, and ambition from Lily King, the New York Times bestselling author of Euphoria
Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller:…
Penelope Lively is a rock star in England, but she’s never been quite as known in the U.S. I love all her work, but this one is my favorite.
We meet Claudia Hampton towards the end of her life. She’s a historian, razor-sharp, fascinating and fascinated, and even at her most self-absorbed, it’s impossible not to love her. I’d name her as one of the greatest female characters of all time, just as complex and shapeshifting as we all are in real life. Every sentence is a gift. If you like Elizabeth Strout or Ann Patchett, you should give this one a go.
Claudia Hampton is dying. As memories crowd in, she re-creates the mosiac of her life, her own story enmeshed with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the centre of her life, Tom, her one great love both found and lost in the "mad fairyland" of war-torn Egypt.
I’ve never read anything quite like this novel centering on a female photographer, Helen Adams, covering the Vietnam War. Years after reading it, I can still picture scenes and, I swear, feel the heaviness of the air and hear the fruit falling from the trees. Soli has talked about how she got tired of reading wonderful novels where the men went off and had wartime adventures and the women just dropped off the page. So she wrote her own wartime saga.
Helen Adams never drops off the page—she leaps off them. The writing is as lush as the landscape, and you’ll fall entirely into the world of the book. There’s war and treachery and duty and passion, and nothing is ever simple.
A New York Times Best Seller! A New York Times Notable Book!
A unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.
On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country…
Born Nameless. Raised in ice and snow. Destined to rule.
Arya Nameless has sidestepped her destiny in favour of joining House Ravenstrike and helping Thiara Ravenstrike become High Warlord of Dunidaen. First, Arya must ensure that Thiara’s only son, Rorin, succeeds in running the Dreadwater Gate into Khadini, a deadly rite of passage that none have survived for decades. If they triumph, Arya will be named general of Ravenstrike’s army and land a political blow against their powerful adversary, Warlord Mathas Crowtalon.
Yet Khadini holds challenges far beyond what they expected. And while Arya contends with wild jungles, fierce enemy warriors, and potential new allies, the Nightstalker continues to seek her with relentless intensity. The monsters hunting her wield a dark magic she has no way of countering. Survival relies on staying hidden, secret.
Yet, when Arya’s wyvern calls, the time for hiding is over.
Born Nameless. Raised in ice and snow. Destined to rule.
Arya Nameless has sidestepped her destiny in favour of joining House Ravenstrike and helping Thiara Ravenstrike become High Warlord of Dunidaen. First, Arya must ensure that Thiara's only son, Rorin, succeeds in running the Dreadwater Gate into Khadini, a deadly rite of passage that none have survived for decades. If they triumph, Arya will be named general of Ravenstrike's army and land a political blow against their powerful adversary, Warlord Mathas Crowtalon.
Yet Khadini holds challenges far beyond what they expected. And while Arya contends with wild jungles, fierce enemy…
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