Gail Godwin

"When the dean of Lovegood Junior College for Girls decides to pair Feron Hood with Merry Jellicoe as roommates in 1958, she has no way of knowing the far-reaching consequences of the match. Feron, who has narrowly escaped from a dark past, instantly takes to Merry and her composed personality. Surrounded by the traditions and four-story Doric columns of Lovegood, the girls - and their friendship - begin to thrive. But underneath their fierce friendship is a stronger, stranger bond, one comprised of secrets, rivalry, and influence - with neither of them able to predict that Merry is about to lose everything she grew up taking for granted, and that their time together will be cut short. Ten years later, Feron and Merry haven't spoken since college. Life has led them into vastly different worlds. But, as Feron says, once someone is inside your "reference aura," she stays there forever. And when each woman finds herself in need of the other's essence, that spark - that remarkable affinity, unbroken by time - between them is reignited, and their lives begin to shift as a result."--Provided by publisher.

Old Lovegood Girls

Longlisted for the 2020 Grand Prix de littérature américaine Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 (Top 10) Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books 2017 Indie Next Summer 2018 Pick For Reading Groups The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from bestselling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin. After his mother's death, eleven-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there thirty years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life. Eventually she was inspired to take up painting so she could capture its utter desolation. The islanders call it "Grief Cottage," because a boy and his parents disappeared from it during a hurricane fifty years before. Their bodies were never found and the cottage has stood empty ever since. During his lonely hours while Aunt Charlotte is in her studio painting and keeping her demons at bay, Marcus visits the cottage daily, building up his courage by coming ever closer, even after the ghost of the boy who died seems to reveal himself. Full of curiosity and open to the unfamiliar and uncanny given the recent upending of his life, he courts the ghost boy, never certain whether the ghost is friendly or follows some sinister agenda. Grief Cottage is the best sort of ghost story, but it is far more than that--an investigation of grief, remorse, and the memories that haunt us. The power and beauty of this artful novel wash over the reader like the waves on a South Carolina beach.

A Novel

Grief Cottage

The novels of Gail Godwin are contemporary classics--evocative, powerfully affecting, beautifully crafted fiction alive with endearing, unforgettable characters. Her critically acclaimed work has placed her among the ranks of Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy, and Carson McCullers, firmly establishing Godwin as a Southern literary novelist for the ages. Father Melancholy's Daughter, is widely recognized as one of the author's most poignant and accomplished novels -- a bittersweet and ultimately transcendent story of a young girl's devotion to her father, the rector of a small Virginia church, and of the hope, dreams, and love that sustain them both in the wake of the betrayal and tragedy that diminished their family.

Father Melancholy's Daughter

Narrates the life of a young female Episcopal priest in High Balsam, a small, economically distressed Smoky Mountain town, which is shaken up by the arrival of three strangers

Evensong

Justin Stokes would never forget the summer she turned fourteen, nor the woman who transformed her bleak adolescent life into a wondrous place of brilliant color. In the little pondside hut also known as the “finishing school,” eccentric, free-spirited Ursula DeVane opened up a world full of magical possibilities for Justin, teaching her valuable lessons of love and loyalty, and encouraging her to change, to learn, to grow. But the lessons of the finishing school have their dark side as well, as Justin learns how deep friendship can be shattered by shocking, unforgivable betrayal.

The Finishing School

a tale of unfinished desires

The red nun

In 1959, as the first wave of Cuban exiles arrives in the United States, Emma Gant, finally free of her stifling family and bullying stepfather, embarks on a career as a reporter for The Miami Star and begins to thrive in the sultry world of Miami, confronting conflicting loyalties, shady dealings, and personal and professional setbacks as she pursues her goals. 50,000 first printing.

Queen of the Underworld

BONUS: This edition contains an Unfinished Desires discussion guide. From Gail Godwin, three-time National Book Award finalist and acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Evensong and The Finishing School, comes a sweeping new novel of friendship, loyalty, rivalries, redemption, and memory. It is the fall of 1951 at Mount St. Gabriel’s, an all-girls school tucked away in the mountains of North Carolina. Tildy Stratton, the undisputed queen bee of her class, befriends Chloe Starnes, a new student recently orphaned by the untimely and mysterious death of her mother. Their friendship fills a void for both girls but also sets in motion a chain of events that will profoundly affect the course of many lives, including the girls’ young teacher and the school’s matriarch, Mother Suzanne Ravenel. Fifty years on, the headmistress relives one pivotal night, trying to reconcile past and present, reaching back even further to her own senior year at the school, where the roots of a tragedy are buried. In Unfinished Desires, a beloved author delivers a gorgeous new novel in which thwarted desires are passed on for generations–and captures the rare moment when a soul breaks free.

Unfinished Desires

Here at last is the eagerly awaited new novel from New York Times bestselling author Gail Godwin. Queen of the Underworld is sweeping and sultry literary fiction, featuring a memorable young heroine and engaging characters whose intimate dramas interconnect with hers. In the summer of 1959, as Castro clamps down on Cuba and its first wave of exiles flees to the States to wait out what they hope to be his short-lived reign, Emma Gant, fresh out of college, begins her career as a reporter. Her fierce ambition and belief in herself are set against the stories swirling around her, both at the newspaper office and in her downtown Miami hotel, which is filling up with refugees. Emma’s avid curiosity about life thrives amid the tropical charms and intrigues of Miami. While toiling at the news desk, she plans the fictional stories she will write in her spare time. She spends her nights getting to know the Cuban families in her hotel–and rendezvousing with her married lover, Paul Nightingale, owner of a private Miami Beach club. As Emma experiences the historical events enveloping the city, she trains her perceptive eye on the people surrounding her: a newfound Cuban friend who joins the covert anti-Castro training brigade, a gambling racketeer who poses a grave threat to Paul, and a former madam, still in her twenties, who becomes both Emma’s obsession and her alter ego. Emma’s life, like a complicated dance that keeps sweeping her off her balance, is suddenly filled with divided loyalties, shady dealings, romantic and professional setbacks, and, throughout, her adamant determination to avoid “usurpation” by others and remain the protagonist of her own quest.

A collection of journal excerpts from the critically acclaimed author of A Mother and Two Daughters sheds new light on the world of a writer as she describes her search for her own place in the world, her coming of age as a writer, her life choices, her travels, and the people, events, and places that served as raw material for her later works. Reprint.

Journals, 1961-1963

The Making of a Writer

Mates are not always matches, and matches are not always mates,' pronounces Magda Danvers. Years ago, dazzling, domineering Magda swept the shy, virginal Francis into one of the most extraordinary marriages imaginable. Now, as she lies dying, Francis's role as the Good Husband is put to the most extreme test. Moving from the Deep South to Eastern Europe and the cathedral towns of England, this is a rich and rewarding novel with the scope and all the moral force of George Eliot.

The Good Husband

Jane Clifford is in her early thirties, smart, attractive, and seemingly kitted out for life with a Ph.D., a job as a popular teacher at a midwestern college, and an affair with a married man. But Jane knows better. And she wants more. She knows what she wants -- passion, romance, 'an age of bustles and rustling silk, fine manners and literary soirees' -- AND what she doesn't want -- to hand her life over to a man. And after a lifetime of looking to books for the answers to life's conundrums, she seems to be finding only more questions . . .

The Odd Woman

To humans, the heart has always been more than flesh and blood. Rising above its biological function, it has, instead, become the symbol of our emotions. Fear, sadness, anger, love, restlessness, discernment, foreboding, pleasure, longing, comfort, pride, despair - all that signifies passion and the human spirit are the domain of the heart. Gail Godwin takes us on a breathtaking journey that spans the entire history of human civilization, combining literature, myth, religion, philosophy, medicine, the fine arts, and intensely personal stories from the writer's own past to explore the full and complex character of this unique icon. Brimming with intelligence and wit, Godwin's explorations and meditations brilliantly track themes of the heart in life, legend, and in art: from the first drawing of the 'heart-shaped' heart to the first valentine, from Gilgamesh to Confucius, from the heart of darkness to wearing one's heart on one's sleeve.A work of great charm, creativity, scholarship, and passion, HEART offers us a wonderful look at where we come from and what has always sustained us.

A Personal Journey Through Its Myths and Meanings

Heart

As a young woman, brilliant, charismatic, and curious, Marsha Danziger transformed herself into Magda Danvers, taking the academic world by storm. She was already a star when she came upon Francis Lake in a midwestern seminary and married him. It was a mating that seemed perfect. But now Magda's grave illness puts their marriage to its ultimate test. Into this turmoil comes Alice Henry, an old friend whose own marriage is crumbling. Can Magda teach Alice the secret of the good marriage . . . and does she even know the secret any longer herself?

What is the heart? We know it as not only the beating thing in our chests that sustains life, but as the wellspring of all faith, hope, and love. In this remarkable book, critically acclaimed author Gail Godwin takes us on a breathtaking journey that spans the history of human civilization, combining myth, art and religion to understand how humans have conceived of the heart through time. From the first valentine to the first stethoscope, from the Ancient Egyptians to the Buddha, from the heart of darkness to heart-to-heart talks, Godwin weaves her own stories of heartbreak and hope through it all. Inspired by the richest of lore, Godwin ultimately arrives at what every culture must discover anew: we cannot let the head alone rule our lives. In this colorful history of the organ of life itself, she discovers a template for a more heart-filled life.

A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life

Shannon Ravenel

Presents a collection of stories selected from magazines in the United States and Canada.

The Best American Short Stories, 1985

Violet Clay had come to New York City from Charleston to take the art world by storm. But nine years, many affairs, and thousands of drinks later, the reality of her shadow life is made clear when she is fired from her job as a freelance illustrator. That same day, she hears that her beloved Uncle Ambrose, an unsuccessful writer, has shot himself. As Violet collects the shattered pieces of her uncle's life, she is forced to face herself and her own tattered dreams. And what she discovers is that she has just been going through the motions of living. She's not even sure she can do anything else. But she's in her mid-thirties and knows she still has time to try again. If she succeeds, she will have broken from her family of dreamers forever and can deservedly claim both the rich rewards and frustrating adversities of the artist's life....

Violet Clay

Award-winning, "New York Times" bestselling author Gail Godwin's penetrating and haunting narrative about intimacy and loss and remorse, set against a background of world-changing events.

Flora

Abandoned by her mother at six, a young girl becomes used to putting her needs after her clergyman father.

Robert Morgan

Charles Frazier

Sharyn McCrumb

Daniel Pierce

Dale Neal

Heather Newton

Glenis Redmond

Wayne Caldwell

Richard Chess

27 Views of Asheville presents a brightly colored, kaleidoscopic vision of a city lately come to prominence for its metropolitan ambience and cultural background. Here is place full of variety and surprise...So it is absolutely untrue that those who call Asheville "the Paris of the South" are holding a grudge against Paris. They know how it is. These days, Paris should be so lucky. --Fred Chappell

Gail Godwin

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