Page-turning novel about dark secrets and adultery. A woman's dark secret from long ago shows up in her current life and threatens to tear it all to pieces. I kept wanting to get back to it whenever I put it down. One thing I appreciated about it was that it was different--the two main character...
On a tiny Carribbean island Maggie is placed under house arrest because of her friendship with the daughter of the island's revolutionary leader. The girl has disappeared, and the authorities believe Maggie knows where she is. As Maggie is interrogated and bullied she reflects on her proud friend...
Traveling from the highland desert of northern Mexico to the steaming jungles of Honduras, from the seashore of the Caribbean to the exquisite highlands of Guatemala, Mary Morris, a celebrated writer of both fiction and nonfiction, confronts the realities of place, poverty, machismo, and selfhood...
This story of a middle-aged woman's odyssey down the Mississippi River is a funny, beautifully written, and poignant tale of a journey that transforms a lifeIn fall 2005 acclaimed travel writer Mary Morris set off down the Mississippi in a battered old houseboat called the River Queen, with two ...
the painted face of the clown with the outstretched hand read. For a long time we weren’t. We’d stand in line and the ticket taker would shake his head, nudging us away, but then suddenly we were. If we stood on tippy toes and stretched our legs, we were just above the thumb of the clown. That wa...
She sketched mountains, valleys, the clouds, the scene from the window of our trailer. Even as a child, I knew her drawing wasn’t very good, but she didn’t seem to care. Neither did I. I sat watching her for a long time. As she drew, her tongue moved in her mouth like a lizard’s. It was always st...
Oliver was planning ahead. He’d been sitting in a stinking cell for a night and the better part of a day. Because he’d argued with the cops, they’d stuck him all alone. It was Saturday and he was fairly certain that no one would spring him before Monday. So he had plenty of time to think. The nig...
Louis. Their goal was to reach the sea, but they fully expected to find woolly mammoths and mastodons along the way. What they were hoping for was a water route to the Pacific. They found an overland passage instead. Clearly the Lewis and Clark expedition was the highlight of Lewis’s life. He com...
It was the first trip to Europe for Cather, a high-school teacher of English and Latin in Pittsburgh on summer leave. With her friend Isabelle McClung, she visited with genuine wonder such sights as London’s East End and Paris’s Notre Dame. The excerpt that follows hints at works to come, Shadows...
because it had entailed years of work and would never get built. That is, the City Council had planned it so that it wouldn’t get built. I was in charge of the project and was still a builder of imaginary cities, the way I’d been years ago when I worked as the receptionist and switchboard operato...