An Elegant Woman

An Elegant Woman

Martha McPhee

Martha McPhee

A powerful, moving multigenerational saga from National Book Award finalist Martha McPhee that explores one family's story against the sweep of 20th-century American history.On a winter day in 1910, at a train station in Ohio, two girls wait in the cold with their mother to begin a new life in the West. Tommy, the eldest, feels responsible for her sister, and in the years to come, as their mother campaigns for women's suffrage and teaches in one-room schoolhouses across Montana, she takes care of Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house, cooking, while her sister goes to school. But as soon as Katherine graduates, Tommy makes a decision that will change the course of both of their lives—separating the two sisters forever, sending one to California and the other to New York. A profound meditation on memory, history, and legacy, ten years in the writing, An Elegant Woman follows one woman over the course of the 20th century, taking the...
Read online
  • 650

L'America

L'America

Martha McPhee

Martha McPhee

In the brilliant Greek sunshine of a small Aegean island, Beth and Cesare meet—beginning a transformative love affair that spans two continents, two decades, and two lifetimes. Cesare is a privileged Italian boy, raised in a prosperous town where his family has lived for five hundred years; Beth, an ambitious American dreamer born to hippies and raised on a commune. The events of September 11 serve as a catalyst for the unfolding of their story, in which passion struggles against the inexorable force of patria.The novel of the American in Europe has a long and lustrous pedigree. L’America adds to this lineage, an evocative portrait of the intersection between Europe and America, the old and the new, and the dizzying, life-changing power of first love.
Read online
  • 20
183