Sur une plage du New Hampshire au tournant du siècle dernier, une jeune femme traverse un passage tumultueux vers l'âge adulte. Olympia Biddeford, fille unique d'un couple influent de Boston, est précoce, bien éduquée et pleine d'idées. Son été dans la maison familiale à Fortune's Rocks est bouleversé par l'arrivée d'un médecin, ami de son père, dont le livre sur les ouvriers des villes industrielles fait sensation. Olympia est fascinée par sa pensée, sa stature et son désir de faire le bien, tout en étant submergée par un désir sexuel irrésistible. Elle et le médecin—un homme marié, père et presque trois fois son âge—entament une liaison impensable et passionnée. Écartant la décence, Olympia avance vers des conséquences cataclysmiques, le prix à payer pour avoir dévié dans une époque impitoyable. Rejetée du monde qu'elle connaît, elle doit réinventer sa vie brisée et revendiquer ce qui lui est essentiel. Ce récit explore la vie érotique des femmes, les préjugés de classe, et dresse le portrait d'une jeune femme inoubliable, offrant un drame narratif magnifiquement écrit par l'une des romancières les plus accomplies de notre époque.
Les Falaises de la Fortune Séries
Cette série explore les parcours tumultueux vers l'âge adulte de jeunes femmes sur fond de conventions sociales au tournant du 20e siècle. Le récit plonge dans les complexités des premiers amours, des éveil sexuels et des conséquences inévitables du défi des normes sociales. Suivez les protagonistes alors qu'elles naviguent les préjugés de classe et s'efforcent de redéfinir leurs vies après avoir pris des décisions catastrophiques. Elle offre une puissante exploration de l'érotisme féminin, des tensions sociales et de la résilience de l'esprit humain face à l'adversité.
Ordre de lecture recommandé
Sea Glass
- 368pages
- 13 heures de lecture
The year is 1929 and Honora Beecher and her husband, Sexton, are just settling into a new marriage and a cottage on the coast of New Hampshire. While Honora fixes up the derelict house and searches for bits of sea glass on the beach, Sexton risks everything they own to buy the house they both love. Along with millions of other Americans, he is blindsided by the stock market crash and finds himself penniless. The only work he can find is at a nearby mill, where a labour conflict is erupting into violence. Shaken by forces they scarcely understand, Honora and Sexton try to build a marriage and home while overwhelmed by passions of every kind. Writing with the power and immediacy that have made her novels bestsellers, Shreve unfolds interlocking lives, each with its own share of love, loss and challenge. This is another gripping and unforgettable story of the human heart from one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.
Anita Shreve's hauntingly beautiful #1 bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection about tragedy, grief, betrayal, and the 'impossibility of knowing another person.' As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to expect both intense exhilaration and long periods alone, but nothing has prepared her for a late-night knock that lets her know her husband has died in a crash. Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As Kathryn struggles with her grief, she descends into a maelstrom of publicity stirred up by the modern hunger for the details of tragedy. Even before the plane is located in waters off the Irish coast, the relentless scrutiny of her husband's life begins to bring a bizarre personal mystery into focus. Could there be any truth to the increasingly disturbing rumors that he had a secret life?
Body Surfing
- 264pages
- 10 heures de lecture
At the age of twenty-nine, Sydney has already been once divorced and once widowed. Trying to find her footing again, she has answered an advertisement to tutor the teenage daughter of a well-to-do couple as they spend a sultry summer in their oceanfront New Hampshire cottage. But when the Edwards' two grown sons, Ben and Jeff, arrive at the beach house, Sydney finds herself caught up in a destructive web of old tensions and bitter divisions. As the brothers vie for her affections, the fragile existence Sydney has rebuilt is threatened. With the subtle wit, lyrical language, and brilliant insight into real emotion that has led her to be called 'a supremely elegant anatomist of the human heart' (The Times), Shreve weaves a story about risk, family, and the supreme courage that it takes to love.