Jan MacLean

"I have never seen any reason to be dull," writes M. F. K. Fisher in To Begin Again, "and since I was less than four I have enjoyed entertaining and occasionally startling anyone who may be listening." From those first stories told at the family dinner table she has continued to startle and entertain new generations of readers over the decades of her long and interesting life. She ostensibly writes about food, but while doing so Fisher created a genre, another way to talk passionately about all the hungers and satisfactions of the human heart. W. H. Auden called her "the best prose writer in America." Throughout her career Fisher made it a practice to circle back, returning often to her past in memoirs, stories, and journals. Less interested in the facts, perhaps, than in the truth that lies behind them, To Begin Again provides us with a new portrait of her early years, from her family's migration to California in 1912 to her first marriage in 1929. Some pieces were written as early as 1927, some as recently as 1990. All are suffused with her trademark wit, intelligence, and insight. Fisher speaks here of the people and events which first shaped her finely tuned and lasting appetites. During these years of "learning to live well gastronomically" she spent several rugged summers with Aunt Gwen, catching and frying fresh rock bass, carrying fried-egg sandwiches "greasily in our pockets on our long treks in every direction of that wild deserted country." This was when the young Fisher first felt the value of being nurtured in body and soul. Later, during sensual family dinners free of the dietary strictures normally imposed by her absent grandmother, Fisher began to wonder about happiness and "how it seemed to be connected with open enjoyment of even a badly prepared dish that could be tasted without censure of the tasting." From the first glimpse of the precocious nineteen-year-old, keenly observant and eager for freedom, through the rich remembrances of Fisher in old age, To Begin Again offers great rewards.

Erin wanted a man she could trust Despite her new teaching position at the Nova Scotia college, a heartbroken Erin McCourt found it difficult to get over her ex-fiance's deception. Professor Simon Grayson, however, practically bullied her out of her frozen state, refusing to let her dwell unhappily on the past. And yet Simon himself was concealing his own private grief. There was no doubt eventually of their attraction to each other. But would their passion be strong enough to overcome their mistrust of love?

Brooke Lawson lost a successful past in the accident that almost look her life, but the healing winds of Hawaii brought her peace. In the tropical splendor of an island night she learned from Ashley Graham the only truth that mattered: There is no past so hard that desire's light cannot show the way to a new and fuller day.

He'd shown her love; fate snatched it away Nathan. Wind, waves and white water had washed him into Kristin's life one night after the Pacific had done its best to drown him. But the chaotic elements hadn't taken Nathan's life--only his memory. That he had no past didn't matter at all to Kristi for she came to love passionately the man he was right then, Desperately she tried to forget his world outside. Then her hopes for their future were shattered with one slip of the tongue. Nathan had called her Carla!