Joanna Scott

A masterful novel about how our choices continue to haunt us long after we've made them from the author of The Manikin, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In the Public Relations Department of the New York Port Authority in 1958, Maggie Gleason is one of several extraordinary young women learning from the legendary Lee Jaffe. A renowned publicist in a man's world, Lee tries to show her charges that despite the obstacles in their way, they can lead fulfilling, successful lives. But when she takes Pauline Moreau and her daughter Sonia under her wing, no one can foresee the deadly consequences of a secret from the past that Pauline can't escape no matter how hard she tries. What Maggie discovers in the wake of Pauline's mysterious disappearance upends everything she thought she knew about work, love, family, and ambition.

A Novel

Careers for Women

A fictional recreation of the life of Expressionist painter Egon Schiele captures the artist's obsessive imagination and unconventional lifestyle in an evocative portrait set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Reprint.

Arrogance

Tourmaline

Caught in a perilous divide between life and death, Mrs. Rundel is both a woman struggling to catch her breath, and the child she was 60 years earlier who struggled to survive the violence of the liberation of Italy and experienced the everlasting innocence of first love from an enemy soldier.

Liberation

After his wife dies, an old man joins forces with a fifteen-year-old runaway and eventually returns to his roots, there to find retribution, redemption, or love

Fading, My Parmacheene Belle

New York in the late 1950s. A city, and a world, on the cusp of change . . . Maggie Gleason is looking toward the future. Part of a midcentury wave of young women seeking new lives in New York City, Maggie works for legendary Port Authority public relations maven Lee K. Jaffe -- affectionately known to her loyal staff as Mrs. J. Having left Cleveland, Maggie has come to believe that she can write any story for herself that she imagines. Pauline Moreau is running from the past -- and a shameful secret. She arrives in the city on the brink of despair, saddled with a young daughter who needs more love, attention, and resources than Pauline can ever hope to provide. Seeing that Pauline needs a helping hand, Mrs. J tasks Maggie with befriending, and looking after, Pauline. As the old New York gives way to the new, and Mrs. J's dream of the world's largest skyscraper begins to rise from the streets of lower Manhattan, Pauline -- with the aid of Maggie and Mrs. J -- also remakes herself. But when she reignites the scandal that drove her to New York, none of their lives will ever be the same. Maggie must question everything she thought she knew about love, work, ambition, and family to discover the truth about the enigmatic, strong woman she thought she had rescued. Careers for Women is a masterful novel about the difficulties of building a career, a dream, or a life -- and about the powerful small mercies of friendship and compassion.

Stories

Excuse Me While I Disappear

Manhattan Masquerade

A Perfect Passion

The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the "Henry Ford of Natural History," by 1917 Craxton has become America's preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world-filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles-wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton's newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, Joanna Scott's The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.

The Manikin

In 1946, Sally Werner abandons her home to begin a daring journey of self-creation, the truth of which she entrusts only with her granddaughter, six decades later. But when the younger Sally's father enters her life and offers another story, she must uncover the truth of her grandmother's past.

Follow Me

Joanna Scott's unparalleled gift for storytelling has inspired hyperbole from critics and her devoted fanbase, which includes some of the most preeminent writers of our time. But not since Various Antidotes, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, has she turned her talents toward short stories. At the seaside wedding of two lovers kept apart by the caprices of fate, a doting uncle looks on while his errant brother, father of the bride,struggles to free himself from a locked bathroom across town. A young woman arrives in Jazz Age New York with stars in her eyes and a few coins in her pocket and after a string of failed jobs, she thinks she's found salvation in a romance with her boss at a local greasy spoon but learns that her idea of herself and others'ideas of her are quite different. A bright business man seems content with all the trappings his good fortune affords, until a flat tire and a chance encounter with a couple of mechanics in the country upsets his entire view. Here Joanna Scott offers a group of tales that celebrate her acknowledged sense of character, plot and her gift for capturing the breathtaking tension even in life's quietest moments.

Everybody Loves Somebody

"On the train to New York, Mrs. Rundel's effort to remember is threatened by the physical force of illness. Caught in the perilous divide between life and death, Mrs. Rundel is both a woman struggling to catch her breath and a girl struggling to survive the violence of the liberation. As Adriana Nardi, she risks her own safety and the safety of her family to help Amdu, a solitary soldier who aspires to be nothing less than a modern-day saint. Although Amdu can't stop the war, he can hold Adriana's attention. Together they experience what will take a lifetime to understand: the everlasting innocence of first love."--Jacket.

A vividly imagined novel from award-winning Joanna Scott. In the mid-1950s, an American family travels to an island off the coast of Italy to make a fortune in gemstones.

Milieu des années 50... Une famille new-yorkaise embarque à bord du Casparia, un paquebot de luxe, direction Gênes, puis l'île d'Elbe. L'idéaliste Murray Murdoch rêve d'y faire fortune en se lançant dans le commerce de la tourmaline bleue, une pierre semi-précieuse.... 1999, Ollie, son plus jeune fils, revient, raconte et se souvient : des jeux ininterrompus avec ses frères au coeur de ce petit paradis méditerranéen, de ce vieil anglais spécialiste de Napoléon, de sa mère Claire et de la jeune Adriana Nardi, une beauté insulaire, auquel Murray ne semble pas indifférent. Jusqu'à la mystérieuse disparition de cette dernière et les soupçons qui pèsent à présent sur Murdoch, au point d'anéantir son propre clan.

Read your date's mind and unlock the secret to true love . . . The Love Key is the first book to combine psychic love advice with dating know-how, in a friendly, funny and accessible way that has mass market appeal. It shows you how to use your psychic intuition to date the right people and find true love. Joanna Scott, psychic counsellor on Sky's Psychic and Soul channel, teaches you to: * Discover your psychic abilities and master your romantic psychic skills * Mind-read your dates and discover exactly how they feel about you * Use your sixth sense to break negative patterns * Identify Mr Wrong before he breaks your heart, and attract a loving partner who is perfect for you

How to Unlock Your Psychic Powers to Find True Love

The Love Key

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and "greatly gifted and highly original artist" comes a masterful collection of stories about the timeless universal struggle to connect (New York Times). Joanna Scott, the critically acclaimed author of ten novels and two collections, turns her “incandescent imagination” (Publishers Weekly) back to the craft of the short story, with breathtaking results. Ranging across history from the distant past to the future, Scott tours the many forms our stories can take, from cave wall paintings to radio banter to digitized archives, and the far-reaching consequences of our communications. In Venice in the Late Middle Ages, a painter's apprentice finds a way to make his mark on canvases that will survive for centuries. In the near future, after the literary canon has been preserved only on the cloud and then lost, a scholar tries to piece together a little-known school of writers committed to using actual paper. In present day New England, a radio host invites his electrician to stay for dinner, opening up new narrative possibilities for both men. Written in prose so naturally elegant, smooth, and precise that it becomes invisible, Excuse Me While I Disappear asks what remains of our stories—as individuals and civilizations—after we are gone.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist and "greatly gifted and highly original artist" (New York Times) Joanna Scott, a masterful collection of stories about the timeless, universal struggle to connect. Joanna Scott, author of ten critically acclaimed novels, now turns her "incandescent imagination" (Publishers Weekly) back to the craft of the short story, with breathtaking results. Ranging across history from the distant past to the future, Scott tours the many forms our stories can take, from cave wall paintings to radio banter to digitized archives, and the far-reaching consequences of our communications.In Venice in the Late Middle Ages, a painter's apprentice finds a way to make his mark on canvases that will survive for centuries. In the near future, after the literary canon has been preserved only on the cloud and then lost, a scholar tries to piece together a little-known school of writers committed to using actual paper. In present day New England, a radio host invites his electrician to stay for dinner, opening up new narrative possibilities for both men.Written in prose so naturally elegant, smooth, and precise that it becomes invisible, Excuse Me While I Disappear asks what remains of our stories--as individuals and civilizations--after we are gone.

A gripping novel about a seemingly charmed marriage and a mysterious disappearance at sea In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn't what he seemed. Originally from Belgium, young Armand de Potter comes to New York without a penny in his pocket. With cunning ambition, he quickly makes a name for himself as both a worldwide travel guide and a trusted—if illegal—antiques dealer. After marrying, he moves the family to a luxurious villa in Cannes and embraces an aristocratic life. But as he grows increasingly entangled in the antiques trade and his touring business begins to falter, Armand's control starts to fray. As the world closes in, he believes he only has one option left. Told with masterful narrative agility, De Potter's Grand Tour is a tale as grand as the tour guide at its center. Drawing on real letters, legal documents, and a trove of diaries only recently discovered, Joanna Scott points delicately toward the story's historical basis and unfolds a detective tale of the highest order.

De Potter's Grand Tour

"Deeply moving. . . . Joanna Scott brilliantly captures war as seen through the innocence of a child." -Bookpage Adriana Nardi is only 10 years old when Allied forces occupy her lush island home during World War II, plaguing the quiet Italian village with violence and uncertainty. Amdu is a Senegalese soldier who abandons his comrades and befriends Adriana after witnessing an unspeakable act that has far-reaching repercussions. Decades later, on a commuter train bound for Penn Station, 60-year-old Adriana revisits her memories of the war and her doomed relationship with Amdu, even as a present crisis threatens her life. "A prismatic and quietly powerful look at war. . . . Scott pulls off kaleidoscopic shifts of observation with a depth of vision possessed by great writers." -Los Angeles Times Book Review "Beautifully realized, exquisitely constructed, and fascinating. . . . A calming and beautiful book to read for consolation, in these dingy times." -Washington Post Book World "It may be about World War II, but this book is as timely as can be." -Marie Claire "Scott's voice remains one of contemporary fiction's most eloquent and essential." -Kirkus Reviews

Joanna Scott

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