Maureen Gibbon

Evangeline Starr Raybuck -- plain-spoken, lusty, and hardworking -- and June Keel are high school seniors, best friends going out with best friends, working together at Noecker's chicken farm after school. Vangie and June make out with their boyfriends together in the same car; they pass dirty notes to each other during the day at school. They tell each other everything: "That was the kind of friends we were". After they graduate, things begin to shift. Vangie gets a job waitressing and moves in with Del; June, unable to get a job anywhere but the local factory, moves in with Ray and his older brother Luke. As they become more involved in their lives with their men, they see each other infrequently, but not so seldom that it doesn't become clear to Vangie that there's something dangerous going on, that June has crossed a line with the men in her life that even Vangie would not.

A Novel

Swimming Sweet Arrow

A sensual portrait of Manet's last years, and a vibrant testament to the endurance of the artistic spirit.

The Lost Notebook of Édouard Manet

A tale inspired by the life of the young woman depicted in Impressionist painter Edouard Manet's Olympia follows the life of a passionate girl in mid-19th-century Paris who after accepting dinner from a handsome stranger is indoctrinated into cultural society.

Paris Red

Suzanne believes she knows who she is: a former wild child, neither virgin nor virginal as a teen; someone who pulls for the wayward girls and troubled boys she now teaches in Minnesota. She has learned to survive good love and bad love and people who don't care at all. At her rented cabin, she gathers strength, like a storm forming over the lake. While looking for a spark in her life, a random coincidence leads Suzanne to try to unlock a harrowing event from her past. She is drawn into an unusual relationship with Alpha Breville, a convicted criminal with a disturbing history; simultaneously, she begins seeing an unpredictable, dark-haired drifter—a cowboy who's part angel, part howling dog. Though the cowboy matches Suzanne in intensity and desire, he's less faithful than the captive Breville. Which man can offer Suzanne the knowledge she seeks? Which man can truly touch her? How can she find her unique peace? In writing that has been likened to Kate Chopin's, Maureen Gibbon constructs a taut story of desire at the other end of the Mississippi, in the north woods of Minnesota. Against deep lakes, casinos, and a bar named the Royal, Gibbon's unconventional characters show us how to play the hands we're dealt and own the choices we make, in a tough and tender book about hard-won redemption from one of America's most original writers.

Thief

Rosso Parigi

One lazy summer, Suzanne escapes her life in the city for a long holiday in the countryside. She rents a cabin in the woods, and places a personal ad in the newspaper: "Great kisser, good listener." Among the several replies to her ad, one stands out. An ordinary letter, unremarkable in every way, except for the postmark: Stillwater State Prison. The sender is Alpha Breville. A convict, a thief, and a rapist. Perhaps against her better judgement, she writes back to him. But what begins as a remote correspondence quickly evolves into something much more dangerous, exciting, and intimate...

Maureen Gibbon

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