The Peacock Feast

The Peacock Feast

Lisa Gornick

Lisa Gornick

From "one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America" (Michael Schaub, NPR), a historical saga about love, class, and the past we never escape.The Peacock Feast opens on a June day in 1916 with Louis C. Tiffany, the eccentric glass genius, dynamiting the breakwater at Laurelton Hall—his fantastical mansion with its columns capped by brilliant ceramic blossoms and the smokestack hidden in a blue-banded minaret—so as to foil the town reclaiming the beach for public use. The explosion shakes both the apple crate where Prudence, the daughter of Tiffany's prized gardener, is sleeping and the rocks behind which Randall, her brother, is playing. Nearly a century later, Prudence receives an unexpected visit from Grace, a hospice nurse and the granddaughter of Randall, who Prudence never saw again after he stowed away on a train to California. Grace arrives with a box of mementos from her grandfather's...
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A Private Sorcery

A Private Sorcery

Lisa Gornick

Lisa Gornick

Saul Dubinsky, a sensitive, shy psychiatrist, was living a dual life. Following the attempted suicide of one of his patients, the dedicated young doctor turned to drugs. When he's arrested on criminal charges, his wife and his father are left to figure out how things went so wrong and why they were blind to the pain of the man they both love. Saul's emotionally remote wife, Rena, confronts the failures of their marriage and, for the first time, faces her shame about her fatherless, hardscrabble past. Saul's father, Leonard, who'd long ago given up practicing psychiatry, blames himself for his son's breakdown. He finds that he can no longer escape the memory of the troubled patient who changed the course of his own career nor deny his complicity in his wife's illness. As Rena and Leonard each grapple with the impact of Saul's arrest, they are drawn closer together-and a delicate transformation begins to occur in each of them.This is an immensely satisfying and ultimately triumphant story abouat the precarious balance within a family and about the unconscious ways in which we affect the lives of those we love most. Full of wisdom and insight, A PRIVATE SORCERY marks the debut of a talented writer.
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Louisa Meets Bear

Louisa Meets Bear

Lisa Gornick

Lisa Gornick

A youthful affair may be brief, but the repercussions can haunt your life—and your family'sWhen Louisa and Bear meet at Princeton in 1975, sparks fly. Louisa is the sexually adventurous daughter of a geneticist, Bear the volatile son of a plumber. They dive headfirst into a passionate but explosive affair that will alter the course of their lives, changing how they define themselves in the years and relationships that follow. Louisa Meets Bear is a gripping collection of linked stories from an author whose work "starts off like a brushfire and then engulfs and burns with fury" (The Huffington Post). Reading Louisa Meets Bear is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, as we uncover the subtle and startling connections between new characters and the star-crossed lovers. We meet a daughter who stabs her mother when she learns the truth about her father, a wife who sees herself clearly after finding a man dead on her office floor, a mother who...
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