Kirjahaku

'Readers, you will shed tears and talk long into the night about this book' ANDREW SEAN GREER'A heartbreaking novel' MEG WOLITZER'A triumph' RUFI THORPE'Unforgettable' J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN'Exquisite' TANIA JAMESAn extraordinarily beautiful and life-affirming new novel from one of America's greatest chroniclers of the human heart, Ann Packer.

A riveting novel about loyalty and self-knowledge, and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who we must be for ourselves. Carrie Bell has lived in Wisconsin all her life. She’s had the same best friend, the same good relationship with her mother, the same boyfriend, Mike, now her fiancé, for as long as anyone can remember. It’s with real surprise she finds that, at age twenty-three, her life has begun to feel suffocating. She longs for a change, an upheaval, for a chance to begin again. That chance is granted to her, terribly, when Mike is injured in an accident. Now Carrie has to question everything she thought she knew about herself and the meaning of home. She must ask: How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or of weakness to walk away from someone in need? The Dive from Clausen’s Pier reminds us how precarious our lives are and how quickly they can be divided into before and after, whether by random accident or by the force of our own desires. It begins with a disaster that could happen, out of the blue, in anybody’s life, and it forces us to ask how we would bear up in the face of tragedy and what we know, or think we know, about our deepest allegiances. Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist.

Liz and Sarabeth were girlhood neighbors in the suburbs of Northern California, brought as close as sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth's mother. In the decades that followed, their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength. But when Liz's adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters, the women's friendship takes a devastating turn, forcing Liz and Sarabeth to question their most deeply held beliefs about their connection. From the bestselling author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier, Songs Without Words is the gripping story of a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point.

Liz and Sarabeth have been friends forever, childhood neighbours bound together in adolescence by a devastating event, the suicide of Sarabeth's mother when the girls were just sixteen. In the decades that followed - through Liz's marriage and the birth of her children, through Sarabeth's depressions and her volatile love affairs - their relationship has remained a source of continuity and strength, a fixed point amid the tumult of their adult lives. But when an unforeseen calamity strikes at the heart of Liz's family, all the assumptions - the deepest habits of their friendship - are revealed in a strange new light, and Liz and Sarabeth must question everything they thought they knew about each other and themselves. Ann Packer's new novel expertly explores the inequities between close friends, the unspoken roles, hidden expectations and deep resentments that can be violently exposed by a true crisis, and the endurance and limits of bonds forged in childhood.

Carrie Bell was born and raised in Wisconsin. She's had the same best friend, the same good relationship with her mother, the same boyfriend for as long as anyone can remember. She is already quietly bored with Mike when he is horrifically injured in a diving accident at Clausen's Reservoir. Now the future that Carrie was only beginning to rebel against looks set in stone. Everyone thinks they know what Carrie will - and ought to - do. But Carrie is caught in a maze of moral dilemmas and is forced to question everything she thought she knew about herself. It is a moment of terrifying confusion, but also of mesmerising possibility.

From New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Ann Packer, a "tour de force family drama" (Elle) that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades. Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of his future family, Bill buys the property and proposes to Penny Greenway, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life appeals to him. In less than a decade they have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, overwhelmed and undersatisfied, chafing at the conventions confining her. Years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence sets off a struggle over the family's future. One by one, they tell their stories, which reveal Packer's "great compassion for her characters, with their ancient injuries, their blundering desires. The way she tangles their perspectives perfectly, painfully captures the tumult of selves within a family" (MORE Magazine). Reviewers have praised Ann Packer's "brilliant ear for character" (The New York Times Book Review) and her "naturalist's vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented" (The New Yorker). Her talents are on dazzling display in The Children's Crusade, "an absorbing novel that celebrates family even as it catalogs its damages" (People, Book of the Week). This is a "superb storyteller" (San Francisco Chronicle), Ann Packer's most deeply affecting book yet, "tragic and utterly engrossing" (O, The Oprah Magazine).