Orange Prize-winning author Suzanne Berne's A Perfect Arrangement is the thought-provoking story of a typical, small-town family entering a confusing time in their lives. When the Cook-Goldmans hire a new nanny for their children, but fail to check her references carefully, their convenient arrangement soon leads to a string of troubling events.
A "brilliantly done" (Sunday Times, London) comedy of manners that explores the unease behind the manicured lawns of suburban America from the Orange Prize-winning author of A Crime in the Neighborhood.Littlefield, Massachusetts, named one of the Ten Best Places to Live in America, full of psychologists and college professors, is proud of its fine schools, its girls' soccer teams, its leafy streets, and charming village center.Yet no sooner has sociologist Dr. Clarice Watkins arrived to study the elements of "good quality of life" than someone begins poisoning the town's dogs. Are the poisonings in protest to an off-leash proposal for Baldwin Park-the subject of much town debate-or the sign of a far deeper disorder? Certainly these types of things don't happen in Littlefield.With an element of suspense, satirical social commentary, and in-depth character portraits, Suzanne Berne's nuanced novel reveals the discontent concealed behind the manicured lawns and picket fences of darkest suburbia. The Dogs of Littlefield is "a compelling, poignant yet unsentimental novel that examines life, love, and loss" (Sunday Mirror, UK).
Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, A Crime in the Neighborhood is the story of a young girl's coming of age during a turbulent time in American history. Living in a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C., Marsha is nine years old in the summer of 1973. While the nation's attention is focused on the breaking Watergate scandal, her quiet neighborhood is going through its own upheaval. Looking back as an adult, she remembers it as a time when her father's abandonment of his family becomes entwined with the arrival of a new neighbor and the death of a boy who lives down the street. Deeply disillusioned by the changes in her life, Marsha takes it upon herself to find the boy's murderer, which sets off a chain of tragic events. A poignant and startling novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood expertly shows what can happen when fear and suspicion gain control of a community's better judgement.
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