Cathleen Schine

Betty Weissman loses her elegant New York apartment when her husband of nearly fifty years divorces her for what he says are irreconcilable differences, but is in actuality another woman. She and her two grown daughters who quite unexpectedly find themselves the middle-aged products of a broken home and whose own lives are in varying states of disrepair and confusion regroup in a small, run-down Westport, Connecticut, beach cottage. As they wrestle with economic hard times, love starts to blossom for both sisters, and they find themselves struggling with the dueling demands of reason and romance.

Greta finds her life turned upside down by the arrival of her grown daughter, Elizabeth, by the increasingly eccentric behavior of her widowed mother, and by unexpectedly falling in love with someone other than her devoted husband.

Alice, a photographer of rare birds, and her maddeningly fastidious mother fight to rid themselves of mom's ex-beau, the unspeakably thuggish Louie Scifo.

Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins, share an obsession with words. As adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation begins to push them apart. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition. A comic love letter to sibling rivalry and the English language by the author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport follows the experiences of identical twins whose respective literary careers are upended by their battle to claim an heirloom dictionary.

"Joy Bergman is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would prefer. She won't take their advice, and she won't take an antidepressant. Her marriage to their father, Aaron, has lasted through health and dementia, as well as some phenomenally lousy business decisions. The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don't just grow, they grow old. Cathleen Schin e's They May Not Mean To, but They Do is a tender, sometimes hilarious intergenerational story about searching for where you belong as your family changes with age. When Aaron dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother's loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy's college days. They didn't count on Joy suddenly becoming as willful and rebellious as their own kids. With sympathy, humor, and truth, Schine explores the intrusion of old age into a large and loving family. They May Not Mean To, but They Do is a radiantly compassionate look at three generations, all coming of age together"--

It's 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned. Lady, whom Fin hasn't seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging '60s. He soon learns that Lady -- giddy, careless, and obsessed with being free -- is as much his responsibility as he is hers.

Jane Barlow Schwartz is obsessed with one question: why did her best friend Martha stop being her best friend? The two girls, distant cousins, had shared idyllic childhood summers in the New England seaside town of Barlow, named for their family's founding fathers. Martha was not just Jane's friend but her idol, her soul mate, her confidante. Then, somewhere along the line, the friendship ended. What went wrong? Was it the family feud, which their parents spoke of only in hushed tones? Did Jane do something unforgivable? When the cousins are reunited unexpectedly on a tour of the Galapagos, they meet Darwin head on. Jane traces back through her Yankee-Cuban-Jewish ancestry to try to pinpoint the "splitting event," the moment when Martha was no longer the Martha she knew. In the process, she ponders the origin of species and the origin of friendship, the instincts of exotic wildlife and of her eccentric shipmates, the evolution of nature and of her life.

A modern tale inspired by "Sense and Sensibility" finds financially strapped literary sisters Miranda and Annie moving in with divorcee Betty in a run-down Connecticut beach cottage, where they find love among the suburban aristocracy.

"This witty companion to Rameau's Nephew, Diderot's light-footed masterpiece, traces the vagaries of a young woman's life as it begins to duplicate the surprising gyrations of an eighteenth-century lascivious novel she has uncovered. Along the path of temptation, love, lust, folly, and reconciliation through the sophisticated labyrinth of contemporary Manhattan, we join this delightful young Candida on her cockeyed quest for truth." "Margaret Nathan is the scholarly though mortifyingly forgetful author of The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny, an unlikely best seller celebrated by feminists and by deconstructionists, and soon to be a television movie. Happily married to a benevolently egotistical Columbia professor, Margaret seems blessed - until she finds herself seduced by the libertine novel she has discovered in the library. Thus begins a series of amorous contretemps that plunge Margaret into the maelstrom of contemporary sexual practice, until she is washed up panting on the farther shore of self-understanding." "A screwball comedy of ideas, Rameau's Niece is insightful, affecting - and hilarious. At once an affectionate satire of New York intellectual life and a moving account of a young wife's coming-of-age, it confirms the stylistic accomplishment and command that critics hailed in Schine's previous fiction while advancing her work to new heights of comic complexity and psychological insight. Rameau's Niece is one of the funniest, most original, and most delightfully readable novels of the season."--BOOK JACKET.