Ellyn Bache
Description
A native of Washington, DC, Ellyn studied English at the Universities of North Carolina and Maryland, meaning someday to teach. Instead, she met Terry Bache - a conservative Catholic Marine raised on a farm and just back from Vietnam, while she was from a liberal, urban, Jewish family. They married and began a 30-year "discussion" of their differences while having the first of their four children. Instead of teaching, Ellyn was soon a full-time mom. She began writing nearly 30 years ago when her first two children were toddlers and she wanted to stay home with them but still have something "adult" to do. While they napped, she wrote freelance newspaper stories for The Washington Post and other papers, and began teaching herself to write short fiction. It took six years, two more children and countless rejection slips before her first story was published in McCall's! Once her youngest child went to school, Ellyn finally began her first novel, Safe Passage (about a woman with seven sons), which was later made into a film starring Susan Sarandon. Many more novels and short stories followed, including a collection of stories that won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize, and several books that became Literary Guild/Doubleday Book Club selections. Ellyn has always written mostly for women but also (with her late husband, under the pen name E.M.J. Benjamin) she wrote a teen novel about a wrestler with epilepsy and (with a musician friend, since Ellyn has no musical talent at all), she coauthored the book of a muscial comedy about a group of aspiring writers. When she isn't writing, Ellyn spends most of her time working in the garden or walking her dog, Chief, a border-collie-lab mix who loves being outside. A native of Washington, DC, Ellyn has spent all her life on the east coast, mainly in Maryland and North Carolina, where much of her work is set. She lives in an old house in Wilmington, NC, only a few miles from the ocean. You may visit her on the web at www.ellynbache.com.
Books
Riggs Park
The residents of Riggs Park nicknamed her Penny, since her hair was the red of a bright copper coin…We’d all grown up in the flourishing Washington, D.C., suburb -- Marilyn, me, Steve, Penny and Wish… the boy I’d loved. It was during the baby-boom years, when the future was luminous. But things don’t always turn out as expected. Riggs Park had secrets, and Penny was one of them.Sometimes there’s a chance to go back and right a wrong. Marilyn is convinced Penny had had a baby, and that the child belonged to her family. My lifelong friend can’t follow up -- she’s fighting cancer. Only I can search for answers. But would finding truth break my heart…or set us all free?
Daughters of the sea
In 1899, a fifteen-year-old orphan named Hannah obtains employment as a servant in the home of one of Boston's wealthiest families, where she meets a noted portrait painter who seems to know things about her that even she is not aware of, and when she accompanies the family to their summer home in Maine, she feels an undeniable pull to the sea.
The activist's daughter
The year is 1963, the peak of the U.S. civil rights movement. A quarter of a million people have just marched on Washington, D.C., where they have been galvanized by Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. In rebellion against her unconventional mother's passionate involvement in the struggle for racial equality, 17-year-old Beryl Rosinsky flees Washington and enrolls at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here, in the heart of the segregated South, Beryl enters a strange world of paradoxes: a culture in which southern gentility masks deep-seated prejudice; a place in which protesters politely march single file on the sidewalks outside of "whites-only" shops; a "liberal" university that imposes a gender-based double standard of behavior upon its students. Though Beryl struggles to blend in, to conform, to reject her destiny as her mother's daughter, her encounters with racism, bigotry, and hypocrisy ultimately force her to come to terms with her family's values - and teach her who she really is.
The Art of Saying Goodbye
Paisley Lamm's terminal cancer helps her and her four friends suddenly appreciate their memorable life experiences, their own families and their lifestyles.
Safe Passage
Gala opera evenings. Sudden wealth and fame. Dangerous undercover missions into the heart of Nazi Germany. Standing up to the perils of the Blitz. No one would have predicted such glamorous and daring lives for Ida and Louise Cook--two decidedly ordinary Englishwomen who came of age between the wars and seemed destined never to stray from their quiet London suburb and comfortable civil service jobs. But in 1923 a chance hearing of an aria from Madame Butterfly sparked a passion in the sisters that became a vehicle for both their greatest happiness and the rescue of dozens of Jews facing persecution and death.Safe Passage is one of the most unusual and inspiring accounts to come out of the cataclysm of World War II. First published in 1950, Ida's memoir of the adventures she and Louise shared remains as fresh, vital and entertaining as the woman who wrote it. The Cook sisters' zest for life and genuine "goodness" shines through every page and explains why the leading opera singers of their day befriended and loved them. Even when Ida began to earn thousands as a successful romance novelist, the sisters never departed from their homespun virtues of thrift, hard work, self-sacrifice and unwavering moral conviction. They sewed their own clothes, traveled third class, bought the cheapest tickets during opera season and directed every spare resource, as well as their own considerable courage and ingenuity, toward saving as many people as they could from Hitler's death camps.Uplifting and utterly charming, Safe Passage is moving testimony to all that can be achieved when conscience and compassion are applied to a collapsing world.