Gwendoline Riley

#2

"Returning to Manchester, her broken home, Esther moves back in to the flat she used to share with her best friend Donna. Surrounded by empty gin bottles, and with her past life safely taped-up in cardboard boxes, she proceeds to turn her back on a 'real world' that seems meaningless and absurd. Instead she lives in her own head: in the dark of the cinema, in between the lines of the books she loves and the stories she makes up, as she wanders the streets with a notebook in her pocket and a Biro stuck in her ponytail. Then Esther meets Newton, a care-worn American wanderer with a drinker's face and an angel's smile. Newton changes everything, but for how long?"--BOOK JACKET.

#3

Josie S- has come with her mother Delia to live in her great-aunt Esther Burkhardt's house in upstate New York. Also living there is Josie's cousin, Jared, Jr., on leave from the Presbyterian seminary. Preoccupied with his studies, impeccably dressed in his starched white shirts, distant and mysterious, Jared, Jr. is an intriguing figure to Josie's curious and impressionable young mind. One summer afternoon, when Josie encounters Jared, Jr. at the riverbank behind the Burkhardt house, dark secrets are shared between them as an unnatural love blooms. A moody sense of foreboding grips the reader from page one as religion, whispers of dark family secrets, violations of trust and virginity, bad blood, and a hint of incest all haunt the landscape of this startling tale of divided family loyalties, psychological manipulation, and the tangled strands of love and fear in the mind of a young girl groping for her way in one fractured American family.