Captain Taylor of the US Army has met Helga only once. But that meeting and everything he learns about her afterwards plants a seed of love that won’t stop growing. But Helga isn't easy to find once lost. And when Captain Taylor visits a Convent in the Southern French resort of Antibes in 1948 he soon finds out that the end of the war isn’t the end of the story. But could the once traitor, spy, smuggler and Countess now really be a Nun? And will Captain Taylor finally track her down? And does she want to be found?
He is a modern gentleman. She is Some Fine Woman and is rather an old-fashioned one at that, not at all “that kind of girl.” Jim Bennett tries to change Dolly Flynn’s mind and update her values to fit with the progressive world he inhabits. But the warnings of the nuns who schooled her have lasted well into middle age for Dolly. In her early sixties, she deflects Jim’s attempts to update her conservative mindset. The two meet accidentally in Concord, New Hampshire, just before Christmas. Dolly has fallen in the snow in front of a supermarket. Both are widowed. Jim, who considers himself the neighborhood senior stud, has singular designs about Dolly. He takes her out several times with the goal of bedding her, but each time something happens to prevent it. Dolly looks upon Jim as a gentleman, not realizing his intentions are not the most honorable. Can the intensity of love and intimacy reach past youth and into the twilight years, and just how are middle-aged children supposed to react to their parents’ courtship? Join Jim and Dolly as they discover that life and love in a new century are quite different from the memories they cherish and the past they respect.
In eight stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes—the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met—the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her—she must count on herself. Some choices are made—in a will, in a decision to leave home—with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus—from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound, these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.
One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place. "Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis
A popular blogger and homesteader shares the joys, sorrows, trials, tribulations and blessings she experienced during a year spent farming on her own land, during which she found deep fulfillment in the practical tasks and timeless rituals of agricultural life.
