Born in East Berlin, Julia is eight when her actress mother uproots her family of four girls, by different fathers, in search of a better life. Their eventual landing in the remote countryside of Schleswig-Holstein solves no problems for this fractured household.Desperate to escape a childhood of rural poverty, neglect and shame, the lonely child becomes addicted to writing. Aged 13, she leaves her family. At school in West Berlin, she finally encounters love.In this grippi...

Before humankind could talk, tell stories, or build collective endeavours, it was 'rhythmic movement in time' that gave the first spark to the human instinct to collaborate. Dance supported a massive switch in human orientation which set the stage for our extraordinary evolutionary journey.Dance made settlement and survival, belonging and language, ultimately possible. In dance, shared movement, energy exchanges, spontaneous patterns, and communal spaces are forged. Thus, fears and...

From the award-winning author of Over the Plain Houses, comes a major novel about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras.Edie Carrigan didn't plan to "get herself" pregnant, much less end up in a home for unwed mothers. In 1950s North Carolina, illegitimate pregnancy is kept secret, wayward women require psychiatric cures, and adoption is always the best solution. Not even Edie’s closest friend, Luce Waddell, understands wh...

It’s 1939, and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent’s self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie’s fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband’s bed, storing strange keepsakes in a...

It’s 1939, and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent’s self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie’s fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband’s bed, storing strange keepsakes in a...