Cathleen Schine - Böcker

Newlywed Alice, Cathleen Schine's unforgettable heroine of "Alice in Bed", appears to have the perfect life. The one fly in the ointment is her mother's detestable boyfriend, Louie Scifo: champion of incredibly bad taste and a bona fide stalker. After Alice's mother cuts him loose, Louie's determination to win back her love casts Alice's whole family into disarray. So Alice embarks on a mission to rid her mother of Louie once and for all, in this rambunctious comedy of manners that is at once 'dizzying, hilarious, authentic, and original'.

Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don't just grow, they grow old, and the clan's matriarch, Joy, is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would have wished. When Joy's beloved husband dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother's loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy's college days. And they didn't count on Joy herself, a mother suddenly as willful and rebellious as her own kids. The New York Times - bestselling author Cathleen Schine has been called "full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to [Jane] Austen's own" (The New York Review of Books), and here she is at her best. They May Not Mean To, But They Do is an intensely human, profound, and honest examination of three generations, all coming of age together.

For years Mamie Künstler, ninety-three years old, as clever and glamorous as ever, has lived happily in her bungalow in Venice, California, with her inscrutable housekeeper and her gigantic St. Bernard. Their tranquility is upended when Mamie’s grandson Julian arrives from New York City. Like many a twentysomething, he has come to seek his fortune in Hollywood. But it is 2020, the global pandemic sweeps in, and Julian’s short visit suddenly has no end in sight.Mamie was only eleven when the Künstlers escaped Vienna in 1939. They made their way, stunned and overwhelmed, to sunny, surreal Los Angeles, where they joined a colony of distinguished Jewish musicians, writers, and intellectuals also escaping Hitler. Now, faced with months of lockdown and a willing listener, Mamie begins to tell Julian the buried stories of her years in Los Angeles: her escapades with eminent émigrés like Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann. Oh, and Greta Garbo. While the pandemic cuts Julian off from the life he knows, Mamie’s tales open up a world of lives that came before him. They reveal to him just how much the past holds of the future.

Eleven-year-old Fin and his older half-sister, Lady, have just been orphaned. Fin has not seen his glamorous sister in six years, but she is now his legal guardian - and his only hope. Uprooted from his home on a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut, Fin joins Lady in her Greenwich Village apartment. With the Swinging Sixties swirling in kaleidoscope colour all around him, Fin soon learns that his free-living, free-loving sister is going to be as much his responsibility, as he is hers.Comic and romantic, joyous and moving, Fin & Lady is a spirited love story about a brother and sister who must form their own unconventional bond in increasingly troubled times. Praise for The Three Weissmanns of Westport:'Elegant prose, pin-sharp humour, and an ending that proves satisfyingly bittersweet.' Guardian'Intelligent and beguiling.' The Times'Sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious, and deeply affecting.' New York Times