Sue Miller

In this town, anyone is replaceable. . . . After a tragic chain of events led to the deaths of their spouses two years ago, D.C. philanthropist Sloane Chase and Senator Whit Montgomery are finally starting to move on. The horrifying ordeal drew them together, and now they’re ready to settle down again—with each other. As Sloane returns to the world of White House dinners and political small talk, this time with her new husband, she’s also preparing for an upcoming hip replacement—the latest reminder of the lupus she’s managed since her twenties. With their hectic schedules, they decide that hiring a home health aide will give Sloane the support and independence she needs postsurgery. And they find the perfect fit in Athena Karras. Seemingly a godsend, Athena tends to Sloane and even helps her run her charitable foundation. But Sloane slowly begins to deteriorate—a complication, Athena explains, of Sloane’s lupus. As weeks go by, Sloane becomes sicker, and her uncertainty quickly turns to paranoia as she begins to suspect the worst. Why is Athena asking her so many probing questions about her foundation—as well as about her past? And could Sloane be imagining the sultry looks between Athena and her new husband?

The Distinguished Guest chronicles the visit of an ailing woman to her son and his family. Lily Maynard is proud, chilly, difficult, and famous for writing, at age seventy-two, a memoir about the dissolution of her marriage years earlier and the spiritual and political crises that precipitated that rift. Now, stricken with Parkinson's disease, Lily must cope with her fading powers as well as with disturbing memories of the events that estranged her from her children and ended her marriage. Her extended stay with her architect son, Alan Maynard, while she awaits relocation to a retirement community, sets the stage for conflicts, reflection, and new understanding. The visit raises questions for Alan about his relation to his mother and to his past, about the choices he has made in his own life, about the nature of love, disappointment, and grief. The story moves between Lily and Alan and among others - Alan's loving, wholly grounded French wife Gaby, their two remarkable college-aged sons, a troubled journalist writing a profile of Lily, an African-American graduate student working on a thesis that connects to Lily's history in the early days of the civil rights movement. Pieces of the profile, excerpts from intimate letters and from both Lily's memoir and her fiction, all form part of the rich narrative as it moves toward its dramatic conclusion.

FOR LOVE gradually dissolves the steely emotional barriers protecting journalist Lottie Gardner’s fragile heart as she prepares her childhood home for sale. Through a series of pivotal events, Lottie discovers the subtle connections between love, pain, and death which have long influenced her personal drama. These include a fatal car accident, a painful cavity which grows to root canal proportions, and dashed hopes for rekindling the fading romance in Lottie’s six-month-old marriage via a weekend rendezvous with her husband, among others. Lottie is reactive to the events which invade the solitude she experiences while remodeling her mother’s house with her college-bound son until she acknowledges that her marriage is worth fighting for despite her husband’s infatuation with the memory of his deceased first wife. As usual, Miller creates evocative characters, interweaving Lottie’s recollections with subjective observations of her immediate world. Through Lottie’s eyes we meet her brother Cameron, son Ryan, and husband Jack, and explore the alcohol-influenced emotional scars inflicted by her now-senile mother during Lottie’s formative years. Another significant character in Lottie’s forty-fifth summer is her former neighbor and childhood nemesis Elizabeth. Recently returned to her own mother’s house to escape an unfaithful husband, the “perfect” Elizabeth provokes first Lottie’s jealousy, later her compassion. Miller’s literary metaphors are simple but far from subtle. The pain of Lottie’s decaying tooth echoes the reopening of her emotional scars. She is unable to work on a magazine article about “love” due to writer’s block, finally abandoning it as her own quest for love evolves from her reluctant role in Cameron’s obsessive affair with Elizabeth. In the end, Lottie ignores a throbbing tooth to drive hundreds of miles overnight to fight for her marriage, accepting at last that it is impossible to experience love without also risking pain. NY Times Review of Book

The fascinating stories featured in Inventing the Abbotts explore the treacherously shifting ground of erotic and family relationships. In the title story, a young man takes up successively with three daughters of the most fashionable family in town. Others concern a young girl in the first blush of sexual curiosity, and a stricken dowager whose seizures release a brutal and sometimes obscene candor. In one story after another, Sue Miller presents a remarkable gallery of characters, offering insight into contemporary men and women with their hungry hearts and dismayed consciences.

"For Love tells the story of Lottie Gardner, her brother Cameron, and their childhood friend Elizabeth, who all come together one summer in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after years of separation. The packing up of her mother's house and the rekindling of the romance between Cameron and Elizabeth lead Lottie to look back at her past, as well as to consider the future of her own new marriage. The intrusion of a senseless tragedy upon the lives of all three characters forces Lottie to examine the consequences of the things she herself has done, and will do, for love."--Jacket.

Catherine Hubbard is at a crossroads in her life in San Francisco. She is twice divorced - although she knows public opinion only seems to allow for one marital mistake - and her three children are grown and scattered. Then news comes that she has inherited her grandmother Georgia's home in Vermont. There, Catherine finds not only the ghosts of her own past but those of Georgia's as well. Georgia's diaries, discovered in the attic, reveal Georgia's deepest secrets - her first encounter with the young doctor she will later marry, the tragic misunderstanding at the heart of their relationship, and the lie that seals their fate...

De auteur beschrijft hoe ze met de ziekte en dood van haar vader is omgegaan.

A Masterful, Engrossing Novel About The Life Of A Large Family That Is Deeply Bounded By The Stranger In Their Midst -- An Autistic Child The whole world could not have broken the spirit and strength of the Eberhardt family of 1948. Lainey is a wonderful if slightly eccentric mother. David is a good father, sometimes sarcastic, always cool-tempered. Two wonderful children round out the perfect picture. Then the next child arrives -- and life is never the same again. Over the next forty years, the Eberhardt family struggles to survive a flood tide of upheaval and heartbreak, love and betrayal, passion and pain ... hoping they can someday heal their hearts.

In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped - for one beautiful, idyllic year - into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor. Now Jo has everything she's ever wanted: a veterinary practice she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters, a beautiful Massachusetts farmhouse. And if occasionally she feels a stranger to herself and wonders what happened to the freedom she once felt, or how she came to be the wife, mother, and doctor her neighbors know and trust - if at times she feels as if her whole life is vanishing behind her as she's living it - she need only look at her daughters or her husband, Daniel, to recall the satisfactions of family and community and marriage. But when an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo's life begins to unravel: seduced again by the enticing possibility of another self and another life, she begins a dangerous flirtation that returns her to the darkest moment of her past and imperils all she loves.

A series of summer house fires exposes deep social faults in the hometown of Frankie Rowley, who makes unsettling discoveries about her aging parents while engaging in an affair with a local journalist.