Sharon Dilworth

In this compelling campus novel, a college freshman exposes hidden secrets as she fights for environmental justice in Marquette. Arriving in Marquette for her freshman year at Northern Michigan University, Molly enrolls in Dr. Robinson's ecology studies class, hoping to learn more about the natural world and how to protect the planet from human impact. She befriends her classmates, Dr. Robinson's Crusoes, who share her love of hiking, camping, and building bonfires on the shores of Lake Superior. Together, Molly and the Crusoes protest the development of Project ELF, a Navy program that is installing a series of extremely low-frequency transmitters across the Great Lakes. The US government claims Project ELF will help the country defend itself in the event of a nuclear invasion, but Upper Peninsula residents fear the communications lines will disrupt the natural environment that they hold sacred. Initially preoccupied with the contingencies of freshman year--roommate problems, dormitory life, and dating--Molly begins to sense that the Project ELF protests may mask a more problematic dynamic between the students and faculty. As she struggles to find her purpose, Molly uncovers layers of lies and misunderstandings about campus life, Project ELF, and her time in Marquette that make her question her place in the community. As in other notable campus novels, like Donna Tartt's The Secret History or Elif Batuman's The Idiot, Sharon Dilworth's To Be Marquette portrays an undergraduate narrator groping for meaning in a world where personal transformation takes place alongside conflicting cultural paradigms.

Back-in-print, a novel about a woman who has difficulty facing up to reality. How well do you know your neighbors? How well do you know yourself? Caroline, thrown back on her own resources when she loses her job, focuses her attention on the street where she lives and becomes involved in the goings-on of the neighborhood. Before long she falls in love with her neighbor's husband and builds a fantasy life around him, believing her feelings are returned. It takes the threatened safety of a child to make Caroline see her life as it really is and to realize that she is not the only one on the street who has difficulty facing up to reality.

Suddenly exiled from Paris by her father, fifteen-year-old Agnes finds herself living in the south of France with her sister Sophie, her ailing grandfather and two servants in the family's long-neglected summer villa. Without any friends, they begin exploring the Riviera as a means of distracting themselves from the mysterious scandal that has sent their family south. It is a confusing place for Agnes to come of age: the beauty of the ocean and the clarity of the light are no match for the opaque intrigues that swirl around her life. This Riviera is a place where people come to reinvent themselves, regardless of the consequences.

In the sparsely settled hills of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, winter's toughness is matched only by the animosity and affection of its inhabitants for each other and for the land that unnerves them. In ""The Long White"", Sharon Dilworth evokes a place dominated by two great lakes whose power and ferocity influence the lives of every inhabitant. The particularities of place and character come together with the clarity and exactitude of a fresh snowfall that both veils and illuminates a landscape.

Each of the 10 stories in Sharon Dilworth's new collection has its special appeal; better still, they come together to form a finely crafted and beautifully balanced whole. Dilworth's fully realized landscapes range from Pittsburgh to Hawaii to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to Europe. They are inhabited by women, men, friends, lovers, neighbors, parents, and children, all of whom remind us that life is rarely what we think it should be.