'Quietly devastating writing' The Observer'Commitment is a majestic novel' Yiyun Li, author of The Book of GooseA masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother's collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from LA to college, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep de...

A wonderfully provocative and appealing novel, from the much-loved author of Anywhere But Here*,* her first in ten years. It tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage-once a genuine 50/50 arrangement-changes, with Paul working long hours and Claire left at home with a baby, Wil...

In her highly acclaimed first novel, Anywhere But Here, Simpson created one of the most astute yet vulnerable heroines in contemporary fiction. Now Mayan Atassi--once Mayan Stevenson--returns in an immensely powerful novel about love and lovelessness, fathers and fatherlessness, and the loyalties that shape us even when they threaten to destroy us.Now a woman of twenty-eight and finally on her own in medical school, Mayan becomes obsessed with the father she never knew, le...

In this flawless novella, Mona Simpson turns her powers of observation toward characters who, unlike Ann and Adele August in her bestselling Anywhere but Here, choose to stay rather than go.As a high school student in Green Bay, Bea Maxwell raised money for good causes; later, she became a successful real estate agent and an accomplished knitter. The one thing missing from her life is a romantic relationship. She soon settles comfortably into the role of s...

"Washington Square is perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced work comparable to Jane Austen's," said Graham Greene.Inspired by a story Henry James heard at a dinner party, Washington Square tells how the rakish but idle Morris Townsend tries to win the heart of heiress Catherine Sloper against the objections of her father. Precise and understated, the book endures as a matchless social study of New York in the mid-nineteenth ce...

Anywhere But Here is a moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer. As they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions, Ann and Adele bring to life a novel that is a brilliant exploration of the perennial urge to keep moving, even at the risk of profound disorientation. Simpson's first novel is ultimately a heart-rendering tale of a mother and daughter's invaluable relationship.

Mona Simpson's first two novels, Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father, won her literary renown and a wide following. Now, in her third novel, the narrator Ann Atassi has been replaced by a third-person narrator recounting the adventures of young Jane di Natali, but the theme remains the same: the search for, and the attempt to understand, the absent father.This time the father is a millionaire biotechnology magnate named Tom Owens. Into Owens's charmed life comes...

When an eavesdropping boy sets out to discover the obscure mysteries of his unravelling family, he uncovers instead what he least wants to know: the workings of his parents’ private lives. And even then he can't stop snooping.Miles Adler-Rich spies and listens in on his separating parents with the help of his friend Hector. The boys’ amateur detective work starts innocently enough. But in rifling through his mother’s dresser and snooping in her online diary, it isn...

Anywhere But Here is a moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer. As they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions, Ann and Adele bring to life a novel that is a brilliant exploration of the perennial urge to keep moving, even at the risk of profound disorientation. Simpson's first novel is ultimately a heart-rendering tale of a mother and daughter's invaluable relationship."The...

Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to Los Angeles so that her husband can follow his dream of writing television comedy. With Paul working all hours and Claire left with the baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for, they hire Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who works in America to pay for her own children’s education back in the Philippines. Lola stabilizes the rocky household, and other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with ...

It Had to be You reaffirms Nobbs as the best writer of comedy and observer of the nuances of human nature that there is today.One man, five very different women.James Hollingshurst is a man shaped by those who surround him. And in James's case, it's some very different women. Be it his trusty wife Deborah, his hapless PA Marcia or his ex-girlfriend Jane. And there's one woman in James's life who looks set to upset the status quo…But a tragic accident is about to sha...

Marc Lewis's relationship with drugs began in a New England boarding school where, as a bullied and homesick fifteen-year-old, he made brief escapes from reality by way of cough medicine, alcohol, and marijuana. In Berkeley, California, in its hippie heyday, he found methamphetamine and LSD and heroin. He sniffed nitrous oxide in Malaysia and frequented Calcutta's opium dens. Ultimately, though, his journey took him where it takes most addicts: into a life of addiction, desperation, decept...