The Lost Wife

The Lost Wife

Susanna Moore

Susanna Moore

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From one of our most compelling and sensual writers comes a searing, immersive novel about a seminal and shameful moment in America’s conquest of the West. Drawing partly from a true story, it brings to life a devastating Native American revolt and the woman caught in the middle of the conflict.In the summer of 1855, Sarah Brinton abandons her husband and child to make the long and difficult journey from Rhode Island to Minnesota Territory, where she plans to reunite with a childhood friend. When she arrives at a small frontier post on the edge of the prairie without family or friends and with no prospect of work or money, she quickly remarries and has two children. Anticipating unease and hardship at the Indian Agency, where her husband Dr. John Brinton is the new resident physician, Sarah instead finds acceptance and kinship among the Sioux women at a nearby reservation.The Sioux tribes, however, are wary of the white...
Read online
  • 539
In the Cut

In the Cut

Susanna Moore

Susanna Moore

A stunning, erotic thriller by the bestselling author of Whiteness of Bones. Following the gruesome murder of a young woman in her neighborhood, a self-determined woman living in New York City--as if to test the limits of her own safety--propels herself into an impossibly risky sexual liaison. Soon she grows increasingly wary about the motives of every man with whom she has contact--and about her own.
Read online
  • 62
The Whiteness of Bones

The Whiteness of Bones

Susanna Moore

Susanna Moore

In her ravishing and moving second novel, the bestselling author of In the Cut tells the story of Mamie Clarke, who sets out to lose herself in New York City.Having only previously known the fragile, magical world of her childhood on the lush Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, Mamie leaves college to visit her sophisticated aunt in New York. With her beautiful and self-destructive younger sister Claire in tow, Mamie must learn to make her way in a world of money, power, sex, and drugs. Moore’s sharp and witty book captures an unforgettable time and place—the Manhattan of the early 80s— and the powerful feelings engendered there.From Publishers WeeklyReturning to the Hawaiian setting of her highly praised first novel, My Old Sweetheart , Moore here evokes also the fashionably decadent milieu of the idle rich in 1980s Manhattan. Mamie Clarke grows up on the island of Kauai, desperately seeking the attention of her remote, "benignly distracted" mother. When she is 12, Mamie is sexually fondled by a trusted servant, a traumatizing event for which she feels she is to blame, and which leads her to despise her body and her femininity. Socially inexperienced and naive, at 21 she goes to New York to live with her scatty Aunt Alysse, one of a group of free-spending, indolent, vacuous, boozy and much-married womenall of them out to snare yet another man. Mamie is able to resist Alysse's meretricious values, but her younger sister Claire, who has reacted to their upbringing by becoming as irresponsible as Mamie is preternaturally guilty and responsible, eagerly enters into Alysse's sophisticated circle, where she falls prey to the drug culture. While Moore's spare but lyrical prose is compellingespecially when she describes the rhythms of island lifeher psychological portrait of Mamie eventually takes on an overwrought and rather hysterical tinge. Nonetheless, this is an engrossing novel, profoundly disturbing in its message of feminine guilt, yet satisfying in Mamie's eventual recognition of how to "purify" her soul. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalIn this coming-of-age novel by the author of My Old Sweetheart ( LJ 10/15/82), 20-year-old Mamie Clarke moves from Maui to New York, hoping to exorcize childhood ghosts that have left her emotionally numb. She achieves peace after a series of alternately amusing and sordid adventures with assorted urban cosmopolites. Unfortunately, few of the potentially interesting characters are fully realized; Moore's justly praised spare prose style here serves her ill as the dry vocalizations of an omniscient narrator. Repeatedly, the reader is told about rather than shown the characters' inner lives. When Mamie and her companions do speak for themselves, they command attention, as do vivid descriptions of Hawaii, but these moments are all too few. Not an essential purchase. Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Read online
  • 56
The Life of Objects

The Life of Objects

Susanna Moore

Susanna Moore

In 1938, seventeen-year-old Beatrice, an Irish Protestant lace maker, finds herself at the center of a fairy tale when she is whisked away from her dreary life to join the Berlin household of Felix and Dorothea Metzenburg. Art collectors, and friends to the most fascinating men and women in Europe, the Metzenburgs introduce Beatrice to a world in which she finds more to desire than she ever imagined. But Germany has launched its campaign of aggression across Europe, and, before long, the conflict reaches the Metzenburgs' threshold. Retreating with Beatrice to their country estate, Felix and Dorothea do their best to preserve the traditions of the old world. But the realities of hunger and illness, as well as the even graver threats of Nazi terror, the deportation and murder of Jews, and the hordes of refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army begin to threaten their existence. When the Metzenburgs are forced to join a growing population of men and women in hiding,...
Read online
  • 38
183