Christina Schwarz

At once darkly comedic and moving, this witty exploration of female friendship, envy, and misguided ambition by the author of the number-one bestseller Drowning Ruth, deliciously satirizes the desire to shine in the world.In All is Vanity, Margaret and Letty, best friends since childhood and now living on opposite coasts, reach their mid-thirties and begin to chafe at their sense that they are not where they ought to be in life. Margaret, driven and overconfident, decides the best way to rectify this is to quit her job and whip out a literary tour de force. Frustrated almost immediately and humiliated at every turn, Margaret turns to Letty for support. But as Letty, a stay-at-home mother of four, begins to feel pressured to make a good showing in the upper-middle-class Los Angeles society into which her husband's new job has thrust her, Margaret sees a plot unfolding that's better than anything she could make up. Desperate to finish her book and against her better nature, she pushes Letty to take greater and greater risks, and secretly steals her friend's stories as fast as she can live them. Hungry for the world's regard, Margaret rashly sacrifices one of the things most precious to her, until the novel's suspenseful conclusion shows her the terrible consequences of her betrayal. Widely celebrated for her debut novel, Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz once again proves herself to be a writer of remarkable depth and range. Like Drowning Ruth, All is Vanity probes into the mysteries of the human heart and uncovers the passions that drive ordinary people to break the rules in pursuit of their own desires.From the Hardcover edition.

"In 1898, a woman forsakes the comfort of home and family for a love that takes her to a remote lighthouse on the wild coast of California. What she finds at the edge of the earth, hidden between the sea and the fog, will change her life irrevocably"--Dust jacket flap.

Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and young niece, Ruth.

1853, and into the happy and affluent Winter family comes handsome and mysterious Conway Graham. Conway is in love with Mia, the eldest daughter of Joseph and Marie-Helene Winter. She reciprocates his love, but recognises in his unhappy sister, Sarah, a woman who regards her as an interloper. Mia and Conway are married, but her suspicions are confirmed when Conway cuts short their honeymoon in Paris after being summoned home by his sister. Sadness and mischief combine to drive them apart, and Mia leaves Conway for Brian Moore, a Hussar whom she meets on the eve of his departure for the Crimean War. Conway refuses to lose her, but Mia has to unlock the dark secret behind Sarah's malevolence and uncover the truth of her husband's close connection with his sister. This is a powerful novel set in the heart of the great pottery region of England, where Joseph is regarded as a master in the art. So Long At The Fair evokes the tragedy and suffering of the Crimean War, and is a complex portrait of family relationships evolves at a time of great social change both at home and abroad, while the author with her customary skill interweaves a bittersweet love story two people driven apart by malice and misunderstanding.