Lily saw nothing of that momentary drama. But Warren had been taken unawares by this clear bit of evidence that his youth was over. That he and Robert and Lily had become adults. It was the moment when he understood for the first time—grasped the clean, severe truth of the fact—that the three of them had become who they had become, and from now on the association of their youth would be relegated to nostalgic musings and remembrances. It was the first moment that Warren looked back at the years of his childhood and thought that they seemed to have flown by so fast.
Lily stepped from the filtered light into the blinding sunshine, her hand resting lightly on Leo Scofield’s arm, so that she paused for a moment when he did while he waited to get his bearings in the bright day. For just an instant while she hesitated alongside her father she had a cursory glimpse of the waiting bridal party. She caught the gleam of her cousin Warren’s fair hair in juxtaposition to Robert’s darker head, and a hazy, amorphous happiness clarified itself in one swift thought before she stepped forward once again: Here we are together. The three of us. Here we are again at last. And then she remembered to move forward with care in order to accommodate her heavy satin train. She considered the next step and then the next, her mind fully concentrated on her progress. But in those few seconds, that fragmentary passage of time, she had satisfied herself that Robert Butler and Warren Scofield were both hers once again and ever after. And everyone looking on had seen—just during that tiny hesitation as she had stepped from the shadows into the sudden, shimmering, metallic illumination, in her pale dress and with her yellow hair—that Lily was as shocking and slender and brilliant with potential as the blade of a knife.
It was one of those singular moments that is seared into a collective sensibility. In that instant when simultaneously Lily stepped into the garden on her father’s arm and Warren Scofield clutched his heart, there was a redefinition of Lily. That day in 1913, at just a little past two o’clock in the afternoon, on Saturday, June 28, Lily accumulated real consequence in the town of Washburn. Within the blink of an eye she acquired a reputation for possessing unparalleled charm and remarkable, if unconventional, beauty. It was the very same moment, of course, that Warren Scofield was privately acknowledged by many of the wedding guests to have suffered a broken heart.
NEW FICTION IN PAPERBACK • GREAT FOR READING GROUPS
House of Women
by Lynn Freed
“An unusual and unusually satisfying novel…. Elements of not one but many fairy tales provide an irresistible—ravenous—undertow for Lynn Freed’s House of Women.”—Kathryn Harrison, New York Times Book Review
“A strange, compelling story of obsessive love…. Riveting, right from the start.”—Colleen Kelly Warren, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The Gospel of Judas
by Simon Mawer
“A superior novel…. A noteworthy achievement…. An intellectual thriller of uncommon substance.”—Chauncey Mabe, Boston Globe
“Mawer’s prose is admirably lyrical, playful, and precise. His greatest strength, however, is in crafting probing, puzzlelike narratives that yield compelling dramas of the mind and heart.”—Michael Upchurch, Atlantic Monthly
The Sheep Queen
by Thomas Savage
“A beautiful novel…. It contains a depth of riches sufficient to give every reader pleasure and illumination.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
“A fine novel…. Mr. Savage is a writer of the first order, and he possesses in abundance the novelist’s highest art—the ability to illuminate and move.”—The New Yorker
Sea Glass
by Anita Shreve
“A helluva read…. Shreve simply has the Gift—the ability to hook you from the first page, draw you in and pull you along, and not let go until the final word.”—Zofia Smardz, Washington Post Book World
“Shreve’s four-hankie plots are pure silk, and her characters are so real you can feel them sitting next to you on the couch.”—Michelle Vellucci, People
These Granite Islands
by Sarah Stonich
“These Granite Islands nicely captures the effect that the competing pulls of marriage, friendship, and dreams can have on an individual. Lyrical writing transports the reader in a fascinating narrative.” —Robin Vidimos, Denver Post
“A lovely novel…. Only as Isobel lies dying does she begin to understand that her own placid life had its own drama and daring—its own hot center.”—Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe
All the Finest Girls
by Alexandra Styron
“An impressively, highly charged novel about a virtually taboo subject—nannying—displaying keen insight into the burdens of inheritance in its many forms: money, love, creative temperament.”—Benjamin Anastas, New York Observer
“Extremely moving and powerful.”—Heller McAlpin, Washington Post Book World
Also by Robb Forman Dew
The Evidence Against Her
“A gorgeous, important book…. Dew’s characters are fiercely imagined, fiercely alive on the page.”—Beth Kephart, Chicago Tribune
“Engrossing… utterly compelling.”—Leslie Haynsworth, Denver Post
“At the book’s end… there is that tremendous satisfaction that only this multigenerational kind of story can give. Robb Forman Dew has a powerful way with prose. Her language is lush and beautiful.”—Joanna Rose, Portland Oregonian
The Time of Her Life
“Everything about this novel is right…. The Time of Her Life is the work of that rarest of people, a real writer, and it will knock your socks off.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
“Mrs. Dew can convey, with a skill matched by few writers today, the quick, peculiar shifts in feelings that we experience, moment to moment, day to day.”—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
Winner of the National Book Award
“Arrestingly elegant.”—Anne Tyler, New Republic
“The rewards of Dale Loves Sophie to Death are quiet but rich, and prove once again that in fiction there are no automatically compelling subjects. There are only compelling writers.”—Katha Pollitt, New York Times Book Review
Acclaim for Robb Forman Dew’s
Fortunate Lives
“Superb… intriguing, believable, and unpredictable…. Fortunate Lives is a superior story, luminous with intelligence and wit and affection, written straight from the heart of one of our most accomplished contemporary novelists…. The insights are so sympathetic, so acute, and so just, I soon came to relish them nearly as much as the beautifully crafted scenes…. There are fine set pieces you’ll want to read again and again…. As a reviewer, I admired Robb Forman Dew’s new book immensely…. As a parent of college-age children myself, I found the Howellses as appealingly recognizable as any characters I’ve encountered in recent years.”
—Howard Frank Mosher, Washington Post Book World
“Robb Forman Dew is one of our premier chroniclers of the everyday…. She has shown a keen eye for the untidy domestic minutiae that is the very sinew of American middle-class life, and a generous understanding of the heart that beats within it: that odd, elastic, irreplaceable organ we call the Family…. Out of the most mundane materials—a thrown-together lunch, a stain on the carpet, the stifled yawn of a child—she fashions loose, low-key narratives that celebrate the quieter virtues, like patient endurance and forgiveness…. Fortunate Lives remains absorbing reading throughout, a tribute to Dew’s powers of observation, the fine, precise light she casts on the domestic scene. She has a gift for hitting minor notes, unexpected moments of psychological acuity…. Readers will find much to admire in Fortunate Lives…. A novel that heightens our senses, awakens us to the fragility of even the most cozy and familiar lives.”
—Robert Cohen, Los Angeles Times
“The perilous shoals of domesticity are addressed with consummate delicacy, grace, and skill…. Dew’s gift is to write simply yet eloquently
of the deep-flowing currents of domestic life, the barely acknowledged emotions that color even ordinary encounters and that glimmer under the surface of routine family activities…. Thoughtful, often provocative, and radiant with understanding.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fortunate Lives is not the kind of book one hurries through…. The power of Dew’s writing derives from her almost microscopic examination of domestic operations and emotions…. We marvel at her careful preparation…. She understands that neat conclusions don’t happen in real life…. Melancholy and graceful, Fortunate Lives tells a story at once universal and painfully specific.”
—Charles Dickinson, Chicago Tribune
“This is the kind of novel one doesn’t find much anymore—featuring a sophisticated, Cheever-like town and people centered around a college and its subculture, where nothing much happens but the reader has a certain satisfaction in savoring the prose itself. A nice haven in the midst of the usual.”
—Rosellen Brewer, Library Journal
“The author’s intuitive understanding of the weightiness of little moments, the unstated significance of a single gesture or expression, is constantly in play—as is her wry sense of humor.”
—Colleen Kelly Warren, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Dew is a masterful observer of small things and their resonance, finding beauty in domestic routines, while her intense characters experience great tides of emotions. She has an unerring sense of the volatile chemistry of families and the intricacies of the soul that both isolate and connect us. A superbly eloquent, perceptive, and haunting novel.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Absorbing reading throughout…. Robb Forman Dew
is one of our premier chroniclers of the everyday.”
—ROBERT COHEN, LOS ANGELES TIMES
It is another summer of transition for the Howells family—Dinah, Martin, and their children, the characters whom Robb Forman Dew so memorably introduced in her National Book Award—winning first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death. With the impending departure of eighteen-year-old David for his first year at Harvard, Dinah struggles against a nearly paralyzing sense of loss. At the same time, the arrival in town of an earnest and naively manipulative young woman begins to expose the surprisingly fragile construction of the Howellses’ determinedly fortunate lives.
“One of Robb Forman Dew’s strengths as a novelist, besides her musician’s ear for dialogue, is an ability to show the contradictory, subtle impulses that become magnified in all directions in a domestic setting…. Dew is even better here at tracking the minute movements of each character toward and away from the others in bravura scenes that are painful as well as deeply funny.
—REBECCA RADNER, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Compelling…. An emotionally precise novel…. An extraordinary tale of how self-identity emerges from the bonds of family.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“The magic of our complete sympathy with Dinah is a testament to the alchemy of this novelist…. We even embrace Dinah’s daring to believe that ‘the real mothers—all the mothers in the world—are simply the fools of the earth in the ways they live with hope, in the ways they must continue to believe that they can save their own children.”
—JOSEPH OLSHAN, WALL STREET JOURNAL
ROBB FORMAN DEW is the author of three other novels—Dale Loves Sophie to Death, for which she received the National Book Award; The Time of Her Life; and, most recently, The Evidence Against Her—as well as a memoir, The Family Heart.
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