Marian cut herself off from her wealthy, conservative Irish Catholic family when she volunteered during the Spanish Civil War-an experience she has always kept to herself. Now in her nineties, she shares her Rhode Island cottage with her granddaughter Amelia, a young woman of good heart but only a vague notion of life's purpose. Their daily existence is intertwined with Marian's secret past: the blow to her youthful idealism when she witnessed the brutalities on both sides of Franco's war and the romance that left her trapped in Spain in perilous circumstances for nearly a decade. When Marian is diagnosed with cancer, she finally speaks about what happened to her during those years-personal and ethical challenges nearly unthinkable to Amelia's millennial generation, as well as the unexpected gifts of true love and true friendship. Marian's story compels Amelia to make her own journey to Spain, to reconcile her grandmother's past with her own uncertain future. With their exquisite female bond at its core, thi
The beloved author at her storytelling best: four wonderful novellas of Americans abroad and Europeans in America.In these absorbing and exquisitely made novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title novella, who gets more out of life than most of us; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high-school kid in America. These stories dazzle on the surface, with beautifully rendered settings and vistas, and dig deep psychologically. At every turn Gordon reveals in her characters' interactions those crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. So richly developed it is hard to believe they fit into novella-sized packages, these tales carry us away both as individual stories and as a larger, book-length experience of Gordon's mastery and human sympathy.
One of today's most admired writers takes listeners on a fresh and personal journey through the Gospels, exploring the mysteries surrounding Jesus. What she reinterprets is a rich store of overlapping, sometimes conflicting teachings that feel both familiar and tantalizingly elusive.
Mary Gordon is the author of six previous novels, two memoirs, a short-story collection, and Reading Jesus, a work of nonfiction. She has received many honors, among them a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an O. Henry Award, an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Story Prize. She is the State Writer of New York. Gordon teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
