The Country Doctor's Wife was first published in 1940 by the author, Ora Lewis Bradley. It is her story and her homage to her husband, Dr. Richard S. Bradley, and the story of her life in Northwest Georgia from the War between the States and the 1930s. It is the love story of a Southern Belle and her Physician Husband. But Mrs. Bradley was no Scarlett - she was so much stronger than Scarlett and funnier by a long shot. You'll laugh out loud and maybe occasionally wince, for Mrs. Bradley holds little back. The modern reader might be taken aback by some of the descriptions, but they will also be educated tremendously about the mechanisms of life that are no longer with us. Take a walk through history with Ora Anna Lewis Bradley. I think you'll be happy you did.
Whether she's sharing near-poetry about her garden, revealing village life and its residents, reflecting on a Quaker heritage, or chronicling the complications of her work as a doctor's wife, Cornelia documents it all with good humor and a passionate eye for detail. Life's small moments are made vibrant, their significance revealed. Sidestepping sentimentality, Cornelia offers readers a self-deprecating grace served with considerable wit. Her memoir is rich with anecdotes, for example tale of the hired girl who patched up victims of an accident while the doctor was out and the account of the frigid night she was pressed into service at a home birth alongside her then fiancé, and so much more. Cornelia is the friend and neighbor you would like to have, a woman and writer who savors life with wit and wisdom. Her memoir is a delight. ~Karen Kotrba, author of She Who Is Like a Mare: Poems of Mary Breckinridge and the Frontier Nursing Service
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE _______________________ 'Near perfection... one of the outstanding works of fiction of the year.' - The Times 'A splendidly bracing experience.' - New Statesman _______________________ Sheila Redden, a quiet, 37-year-old doctor's wife, has long been looking forward to returning with her husband to the town where they spent their honeymoon over twenty years ago. Little does she suspect that after a chance encounter in Paris she will end up spending her holiday with a man she has only just met, an American man ten years her junior. Four weeks later, Sheila is nowhere to be found. Owen Deane, her brother, follows her steps to Paris in the hopes of shedding some light on her disappearance, but soon begins to wonder if she will ever reappear. Interspersed with Sheila's harrowing memories of her hometown of Ulster at the height of the troubles, this is a compelling and powerful tale of love, escape and abandon. _______________________ 'The subject - an ordinary woman seized by love for a younger man in the middle of her life - supplies just the right material for Mr. Moore's tender, probing technique. It is uncanny: No other male writer, I swear (and precious few females), knows so much about women' - Sunday Telegraph
There were two surgeons in the little town of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, in pretty pastoral Midlandshire,—Mr. Pawlkatt, who lived in a big, new, brazen-faced house in the middle of the queer old High Street; and John Gilbert, the parish doctor, who lived in his own house on the outskirts of Graybridge, and worked very hard for a smaller income than that which the stylish Mr. Pawlkatt derived from his aristocratic patients. John Gilbert was an elderly man, with a young son. He had married late in life, and his wife had died very soon after the birth of this son. It was for this reason, most likely, that the surgeon loved his child as children are rarely loved by their fathers—with an earnest, over-anxious devotion, which from the very first had been something womanly in its character, and which grew with the child's growth. Mr. Gilbert's mind was narrowed by the circle in which he lived. He had inherited his own patients and the parish patients from his father, who had been a surgeon before him, and who had lived in the same house, with the same red lamp over the little old-fashioned surgery-door, for eight-and-forty years, and had died, leaving the house, the practice, and the red lamp to his son. If John Gilbert's only child had possessed the capacity of a Newton or the aspirations of a Napoleon, the surgeon would nevertheless have shut him up in the surgery to compound aloes and conserve of roses, tincture of rhubarb and essence of peppermint. Luckily for the boy, he was only a common-place lad, with a good-looking, rosy face; clear grey eyes, which stared at you frankly; and a thick stubble of brown hair, parted in the middle and waving from the roots. He was tall, straight, and muscular; a good runner, a first-rate cricketer, tolerably skilful with a pair of boxing-gloves or single-sticks, and a decent shot. He wrote a fair business-like hand, was an excellent arithmetician, remembered a smattering of Latin, a random line here and there from those Roman poets and philosophers whose writings had been his torment at a certain classical and commercial academy at Wareham. He spoke and wrote tolerable English, had read Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, and infinitely preferred the latter, though he made a point of skipping the first few chapters of the great novelist's fictions in order to get at once to the action of the story. He was a very good young man, went to church two or three times on a Sunday, and would on no account have broken any one of the Ten Commandments on the painted tablets above the altar by so much as a thought. He was very good; and, above all, he was very good-looking. No one had ever disputed this fact: George Gilbert was eminently good-looking. No one had ever gone so far as to call him handsome; no one had ever presumed to designate him plain. He had those homely, healthy good looks which the novelist or poet in search of a hero would recoil from with actual horror, and which the practical mind involuntarily associates with tenant-farming in a small way, or the sale of butcher's meat.
For a limited time at a special price, enjoy beloved mystery writer Tamar Myers' novel The Witch Doctor's Wife—an enthralling tale of duty, greed, danger, and miracles in equatorial Africa. As a bonus, you get an excerpt from The Headhunter's Daughter and The Boy Who Stole the Leopard's Spots, on sale May 8, 2012. The Congo beckons to young Amanda Brown in 1958, as she follows her missionary calling to the mysterious "dark continent" far from her South Carolina home. But her enthusiasm cannot cushion her from the shock of a very foreign culture—where competing missionaries are as plentiful as flies, and oppressive European overlords are busy stripping the land of its most valuable resource: diamonds. Little by little, Amanda is drawn into the lives of the villagers in tiny Belle Vue—and she is touched by the plight of the local witch doctor, a man known as Their Death, who has been forced to take a second job as a yardman to support his two wives. But when First Wife stumbles upon an impossibly enormous uncut gem, events are set in motion that threaten to devastate the lives of these people Amanda has come to admire and love—events that could lead to nothing less than murder.
