Dawn Tripp

In this mesmerizing novel of the life of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, bestselling author Dawn Tripp has crafted an intimate story of love and power, family and tragedy, loss and reinvention. When Jackie is twenty-one, she meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy at a dinner party in Georgetown. She is dreaming of France, of a life of freedom and adventure. She has won an internship at Vogue, and she thinks Kennedy is not her kind of adventure: “Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.” And yet there is his intelligence, his humor and drive, and the chemistry between them. He pursues her, then disappears, then pursues her again in a pattern of intimacy and distance. She doesn’t fit in during a weekend at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, yet she overhears Jack’s father, brother and Jack discussing her. After Jack wins a seat in the Senate, they marry, but the early years of marriage are lonely, and she is devastated when she sees Jack leave a party with a woman in a silver dress—and realizes everyone else has noticed too. During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then, suddenly, we are in a convertible and a motorcade in Dallas, when violence strikes. “Three and a half seconds—that’s all it was—a slivered instant between the first shot which missed the car, and the second shot which did not. If she had recognized the first sound for what it was. A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved.” We are with Jackie during the years of mourning, as her focus is always her children; then through the rise and death of Bobby Kennedy; her marriage to businessman Aristotle Onassis; her tenure as an editor at Doubleday; and the final years as a remarkable woman thinks about her life. From the author of the “magical” (USA Today) Georgia, this spellbinding and deeply researched novel takes us into the heart and mind of one of the most famous women in history.

A Novel

Jackie

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In a dazzling work of historical fiction in the vein of Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank, Dawn Tripp brings to life Georgia O’Keeffe, her love affair with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and her quest to become an independent artist. This is not a love story. If it were, we would have the same story. But he has his, and I have mine. In 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe is a young, unknown art teacher when she travels to New York to meet Stieglitz, the famed photographer and art dealer, who has discovered O’Keeffe’s work and exhibits it in his gallery. Their connection is instantaneous. O’Keeffe is quickly drawn into Stieglitz’s sophisticated world, becoming his mistress, protégé, and muse, as their attraction deepens into an intense and tempestuous relationship and his photographs of her, both clothed and nude, create a sensation. Yet as her own creative force develops, Georgia begins to push back against what critics and others are saying about her and her art. And soon she must make difficult choices to live a life she believes in. A breathtaking work of the imagination, Georgia is the story of a passionate young woman, her search for love and artistic freedom, the sacrifices she will face, and the bold vision that will make her a legend. Praise for Georgia “Complex and original . . . Georgia conveys O’Keeffe’s joys and disappointments, rendering both the woman and the artist with keenness and consideration.”—The New York Times Book Review “As magical and provocative as O’Keeffe’s lush paintings of flowers that upended the art world in the 1920s . . . Tripp inhabits Georgia’s psyche so deeply that the reader can practically feel the paintbrush in hand as she creates her abstract paintings and New Mexico landscapes. . . . Evocative from the first page to the last, Tripp’s Georgia is a romantic yet realistic exploration of the sacrifices one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century made for love.”—USA Today “Sexually charged . . . insightful . . . Dawn Tripp humanizes an artist who is seen in biographies as more icon than woman. Her sensuous novel is as finely rendered as an O’Keeffe painting.”—The Denver Post “A vivid work forged from the actual events of O’Keeffe’s life . . . [Tripp] imbues the novel with a protagonist who forces the reader to consider the breadth of O’Keeffe’s talent, business savvy, courage and wanderlust. . . . [She] is vividly alive as she grapples with success, fame, integrity, love and family.”—Salon

A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia

A lush and haunting first novel, Moon Tide follows the lives of three women in a small fishing town on the Massachusetts coast, from 1913 to the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. Through sensual and interwoven stories, Moon Tide explores the secret workings of the heart—the violence of desire and memory, the redemptive power of longing—matched against society’s rules of class and the unpredictable tempers of the natural world. At the center of the novel is Eve, who takes refuge in silence and art after the death of her mother. Eve can sense how the past nips at the heels of the living, and her ethereal beauty inspires a quiet passion in Jake, the son of a local stonemason. For Elizabeth, Eve’s wealthy, eccentric grandmother, one summer at Westport Point extends into a lifetime. She stays on in the town year-round, building a great library in her house for the cold New England winters, haunted by the Ireland of her youth and by one man’s doomed obsession with nature. And then there is Maggie, the exotic stranger with a peculiar clairvoyance. Maggie lives in the precarious space between the locals and the rich—a balance that is ultimately compromised by Wes, a ruthless rum-smuggler, whose desire for her triggers small cruelties and then a staggering act of violence. With lyrical prose, wisdom, and insight, Dawn Clifton Tripp maps the shifting tensions in a small town on the verge of change. Like the growing weight of a storm, the lives in Westport Point build in emotional momentum even as the Great Hur-ricane approaches, and the landscape of the earth comes to reflect the geography of the mind. A novel of love and loss, survival and revelation, Moon Tide is an extraordinary debut.

Moon Tide

Jane Weld was eleven years old when her father, Luce, disappeared in 1957. His skiff was found drifting near a marsh, empty except for his hunting coat and a box of shotgun shells. No one in their small New England town knew for sure what happened until, three years later, Luce’s skull rolled out of a gravel pit, a bullet hole in the temple. Rumors sprang up that he had been murdered by the jealous husband of his mistress, Ada Varick. Now, half a century later, Jane is still searching for the truth of her father’s death, a mystery made more urgent by the unexpected romance that her willful daughter, Marne, has struck up with one of Ada’s sons. As the love affair intensifies, Jane and Ada meet for their weekly Friday game of Scrabble, a pastime that soon transforms into a cat-and-mouse game of words long left unspoken, and dark secrets best left untold. A Boston Globe bestseller Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.

Game of Secrets

BONUS: This edition contains a The Season of Open Water discussion guide and an excerpt from Dawn Tripp's Game of Secrets. From the critically acclaimed author of Moon Tide comes a mesmerizing novel of love and violence, family and betrayal. The Season of Open Water is the passionate, searing story of a young woman coming of age in a New England seacoast town that is swept up in the dangerous trade of rum-running. It is October 1927. Bridge Weld is nineteen, headstrong and beautiful, working in her grandfather Noel's boatbuilding shop. When Noel is approached by a local bootlegger to refit a boat for smuggling, he feels in his gut that he should not accept the work, yet he takes the job for the money it offers and for the chance it gives him to build a future for his beloved granddaughter, Bridge, and her brother, Luce. What Noel doesn’t count on is that Luce will be lured into the rum work himself and will try to pull Bridge into it with him. But Bridge has embarked on a different course. Caught up in a passion for Henry, a veteran of World War I, Bridge is propelled beyond the confines of her known world, and ultimately she must choose between the man who loves her and the brother to whom she has been loyal all her life. As Bridge strikes out on her own, Luce's fierce attachment spirals out of control. Exquisitely written, haunting in its rendering of place, The Season of Open Water is a superb novel about a family and the lawlessness of the heart, a love story that explores the often inescapable connections between violence and desire.

Dawn Tripp

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