Delphinium Books – serie

A woman retreats from academic life in New York City to manage a family goat farm in New England, a novel that Richard Russo calls “splendid and provides what I crave from all stories: vividly drawn characters worth spending time with and a richly rendered place for them to inhabit."  Lucy Richard has enjoyed a two-decade-long, successful career in public relations in New York City when she feels compelled to move back to rural Massachusetts to try to save her father’s farm. Returning to her childhood home at age 47 is hard enough, but the difficulties multiply once she’s settled in: her determination to raise dairy goats and make cheese is hampered at first by her total inexperience, and then by the sudden loss of her farming mentor. To make matters worse, her husband, Michael, who followed her to the farm reluctantly and who has made a disastrous financial decision, is suddenly in severely declining health. Lucy finds solace in Sandy, a girlhood companion who quickly becomes more than a friend, but their new intimacy places the Richard farm in the crosshairs of Sandy’s employer, a solar energy company. How Lucy contends with the precariousness—at once financial, physical and emotional— of her new life, and with the competing passions and obligations that grow within and around her, is at the heart of this intimate drama of love and loss, of desire and friendship, and of the alluring possibilities of second acts.

A vibrant novel that portrays the lives of an American woman fleeing the trauma of childhood abuse and an Iraqi refugee fleeing the trauma of war, each in the midst of childbirth, that Joyce Carol Oates praises as “breathtaking, heartrending, and finally uplifting” and Richard Ford declares “involved me so thoroughly that I began to anticipate how it would end.”Lorraine and Will, New Yorkers married for 15 years, are having their first baby, via IVF. They are 40, successful in their careers—finance and music—with pasts that have held each of them back from one another until the day While We Were Waiting unfolds: the day in the middle of Lorraine’s sixth month when she is rushed to the high-risk obstetrics unit of Met U Hospital. Over thenext hours Lorraine and Will, individually, are compelled to face themselves and their pasts in ways they’d never thought possible: Will struggling with the loss of a beloved mentor who perished with the World Trade Center; Lorraine, a musical prodigy dealing with the ongoing aftermath of betrayal and abuse.Sharing the waiting room with Will is Clement, an Iraqi archeologist newly arrived in America, having fled with his family from ISIS. He, too, struggles with trauma – from a murderous terrorist attack, from the high-risk delivery that his wife is enduring, and from a long-ago guilt that makes him fear for his laboring wife and their unborn child. As the space shared by Will and Clement expands with every hour and revelation. Lorraine’s labor compels her to let go of the grievous harm done to her in her youth, making While We Were Waiting a story about the imaginative power of acceptance and love.

A complex family drama with a Manhattan family court judge at its center.I Don’t Know How to Tell You This focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close Jewish family whose lives are marked by significant emotional challenges, including the painful recognition that her beloved husband is slowly being diminished by memory loss, and the past trauma of her mother-in-law, a prickly Holocaust survivor who, in old age, continues to struggle with her grief. Rachel’s career as a judge and the power she wields in her courtroom offer an intimate look at a woman navigating what is still, in the 21st century, a profession most often dominated by men. The novel explores the very topical issues of child and spousal abuse, which color the dark undercurrent of the courtroom scenes. And though it reflects serious issues, there is very clearly a pitch-black comic sensibility at work throughout the novel.  By turns sad and touching and quirkily humorous, I Don’t Know How To Tell You This is vintage Marian Thurm.