Jennifer Vanderbes

Volunteering as a World War II Army nurse after receiving a cryptic letter from her missing-in-action soldier brother, Juliet finds her search challenged by the violent chaos of field hospital work and the court-martial proceedings of a wounded deserter who may hold answers. By the award-winning author of Easter Island. 35,000 first printing.

A Novel

The Secret of Raven Point

On Thanksgiving Day 2007, as the country teeters on the brink of a recession, three generations of the Olson family gather. Eleanor and Gavin worry about their daughter, a single academic, and her newly adopted Indian child, and about their son, who has been caught in the imploding real-estate bubble. While the Olsons navigate the tensions and secrets that mark their relationships, seventeen-year-old Kijo Jackson and his best friend Spider set out from the nearby housing projects on a mysterious job. A series of tragic events bring these two worlds ever closer, exposing the dangerously thin line between suburban privilege and urban poverty, and culminating in a crime that will change everyone’s life. In her gripping new book, Jennifer Vanderbes masterfully lays bare the fraught lives of this complex cast of characters and the lengths to which they will go to protect their families. Strangers at the Feast is at once a heartbreaking portrait of a family struggling to find happiness and an exploration of the hidden costs of the American dream. Published to international acclaim, Jennifer Vanderbes’s first book, Easter Island, was hailed as “one of those rare novels that appeals equally to heart, mind, and soul,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. In her second novel, this powerful writer reaches new heights of storytelling. This page-turner wrestles with the most important issues of our time—race, class, and above all else, family. Strangers at the Feast will leave readers haunted and deeply affected.

Strangers at the Feast

The centuries-old mysteries and haunting past of Easter Island become catalysts for the parallel quests of two young women, separated by sixty years of history--Elsa Pendleton, who travels to Easter Island with her anthropologist husband in 1913, and widowed American botanist Dr. Greer Faraday--as they confront discoveries about themselves and the people they love. A first novel. Reprint.

Easter Island

The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims

Wonder Drug

Annika Eräpuro

Pääsiäissaari

"1943: When seventeen-year-old Juliet Dufresne receives a cryptic letter from her enlisted brother and then discovers that he's been reported missing in action, she lies about her age and travels to the front lines as an army nurse, determined to find him. Shy and awkward, Juliet is thrust into the bloody chaos of a field hospital, a sprawling encampment north of Rome where she forges new friendships and is increasingly consumed by the plight of her patients. One in particular, Christopher Barnaby, a deserter awaiting court-martial, may hold the answer to her brother's whereabouts--but the trauma of war has left him catatonic. Racing against the clock, Juliet works with an enigmatic young psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Willard, to break Barnaby's silence before the authorities take him away. Plunged into the horrifying depths of one man's memories of combat, Juliet and Willard are forced to plumb the moral nuances of a so-called just war and to face the dangers of their own deepening emotional connection.

a novel

The secret of Raven Point

The centuries-old mysteries and haunting past of Easter Island become catalysts for the parallel quests of two young women, separated by sixty years of history as they confront discoveries about themselves and the people they love.

Jennifer Vanderbes

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