Past New Fiction

When his wife Rachel, who is pregnant, leaves him, Bruce Peyton, while dealing with his spoiled thirteen-year-old daughter Jolene, is determined to get her back with a little help from his Cedar Cove friends.

Once the center of madness, suicide, mass murder, and whispers of things far worse, the 1800s Gilded Age palace known as the Pendleton, has been re-christened in the 1970s as a luxury apartment building. But now inexplicable shadows caper across walls, security cameras relay impossible images, phantom voices mutter in strange tongues, not-quite-human figures lurk in the basement, and elevators plunge into unknown depths.

Although perhaps best known for her novels, British writer Margaret Drabble is also a  master of the short story form. This collection includes stories published between 1964 and 2000, dealing with human relationships in all their messy, sprawling, painful, and glorious reality. In “Hassan’s Tower,” we meet a couple honeymooning in Morocco who discover to their chagrin how little they really know—or love—each other. “The Merry Widow” tells of a woman who has finally escaped a marriage filled with unhappiness and mistreatment, while the title story considers the delicate balancing act women must often perform as mothers, wives, career women, and as individuals with their own goals and interests. All of these stories are beautifully observed and lyrically written, and often full of black humor; they are like individual fabulous gems artfully pieced together to form a stunning whole.

A tale set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution follows the struggles of Kai Ying to safeguard her family when her teacher husband is arrested and sent to a "reeducation" labor camp for criticizing the Communist Party.