Mary McGarry Morris

Abandoned by his wife, a man tries to protect his family during the Great Depression, in this "powerful" novel by the bestselling author of Songs in Ordinary Time (Publishers Weekly). During the Great Depression, rural Vermont suffers along with the rest of the country, and Henry Talcott, with only occasional work as a butcher, is reduced to moving into a tent on the edge of Black Pond with his two children. Their beautiful but unreliable mother has...

"It's the summer of 1960 in Atkinson, Vermont. Marie Fermoyle is a strong but vulnerable divorced woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for dangerous con man Omar Duvall. Marie's children are Alice, seventeen-involved with a young priest; Norm, sixteen-hotheaded and idealistic; and Benjy, twelve-isolated and misunderstood, and so desperate for his mother's happiness that he hides the deadly truth he knows about Duvall....

The "compelling, suspenseful" novel of a vulnerable misfit in a small town by the New York Times-bestselling author of Light from a Distant Star (Publishers Weekly). Named one of the five best novels of the year by Time magazine, A Dangerous Woman is the story of the damaged and emotionally unstable Martha Horgan, an outcast in her small Vermont town. She stares; she has violent crushes on people; and, perhaps most unsettling of all, she cannot stop...

From a New York Times–bestselling "writer to reckon with," a psychological suspense about a woman whose life is fractured by a childhood crime (The New York Times Book Review). There was the moment eight-year-old Ruth Corrigan ran away from playing in the woods with her best friend, and then the moment after, when Ceely was gone. Murdered. Now the silence of that day lives within Ruth. Lives in the judgment she sees in the faces of so many in...

Wallace a laborer in his late forties; Dotty, an abused teenager who flaunts her sexuality; and a little girl stolen from her playpen are bound together for the next five years by Dotty's manic moods and Wallace's tragic helplessness.

In the two powerful novels collected here, Morris offers compassionate accounts of damaged and desperate people struggling to survive. The Lost Mother: Told from the perspective of twelve-year-old Thomas, The Lost Mother follows a shattered family in rural Vermont during the Great Depression. Deserted by their mother, Thomas and his eight-year-old sister, Margaret, are reduced to living in a tent with their father, Henry. When a wealthy neighbor begins...