Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut.
Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But very soon, Amanda comes to see that her old home is no refuge--she has carried her troubles with her. On one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly everything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears and is later found drowned beneath the ice that covers the lake. When Mathilda's husband comes home from the war, wounded and troubled himself, he finds that Amanda has taken charge of Ruth and the farm, assuming her responsibility with a frightening intensity. Wry and guarded, Amanda tells the story of her family in careful doses, as anxious to hide from herself as from us the secrets of her own past and of that night.
Ruth, haunted by her own memory of that fateful night, grows up under the watchful eye of her prickly and possessive aunt and gradually becomes aware of the odd events of her childhood. As she tells her own story with increasing clarity, she reveals the mounting toll that her aunt's secrets exact from her family and everyone around her, until the heartrending truth is uncovered. Guiding us through the lives of the Starkey women, Christina Schwarz's first novel shows her compassion and a unique understanding of the American landscape and the people who live on it.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman is the unequivocal “master of the psychological thriller” (People). Tanya Bigelow was a solemn little girl when Dr. Alex Delaware successfully treated her obsessive-compulsive sympt...
First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by...
Ian McEwan has received prestigious awards and international praise for his novels, including Enduring Love. In Atonement, three children lose their innocence--as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935--and their lives are ...
A woman’s past and present collide with unexpected results in this hauntingly beautiful debut novel set in rural Vermont.Forty-one-year-old school nurse Kate Cypher has returned home to rural Vermont to care for her mother who’s afflict...
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally...
Narrator: Janet Song,Jodi Long Published: 06/28/2005
An intoxicating debut novel of "one motherless daughter's discovery of...the strange and wonderful places we find love" —The Washington PostSue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike...
Lisa Jackson's novels of romance and suspense race up the best-seller charts. In Left to Die, the Pinewood County Sheriff 's Department is on the trail of a cold-blooded killer who acts as a savior to women stranded during terrible mountain snowstor...
When a former client jumps naked from a Boston landmark, Private Investigator Patrick Kenzie wants to know why. Once a perky young woman in love with life, her suicide is the final fall in a spiral of self-destruction.What Kenzie discovers is a sad...
He needed me For nearly twenty years, those three words dictated the life of Lillian Manville. Quiet, unassuming, and overweight, Lillian did anything to please her husband, the self-made billionaire James Manville. Since the age of seventeen, she ...
AudiobooksNow review by Nicole on 2007-11-05 01:18:47
awesome, such creative writing, gives you the unexpected, i have been recommending to everyone
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