Henry Carter Hull

Finalist for the National Book Award: Christine Schutt's masterful novel-hailed by John Ashbery as "an amazing achievement"-about a remarkable little girl who comes of age, adrift, in the care of a rotating cast of indifferent relatives Alice Fivey is seven years old when her father dies, and ten when her mentally fragile mother is institutionalized. So begins the "sleepover life" for Alice. Shuttled among the homes of wealthy relatives, retainers,...

Firefly Cloak is the powerfully vivid coming-of-age story of Tessa Lee, who, after being abandoned by her mother, sets off on a risky journey to discover what she has lost. When eight-year-old Tessa Lee and her brother, Travis, are abandoned in a campground by their desperate mother and her boyfriend of the moment, they are left with only two things: a phone number written in Magic Marker on Travis's back and their mother's favorite housecoat, which...

Dark and compassionate, graceful yet raw, Undressing the Moon explores the seams between childhood and adulthood, between love and loss. . . At thirty, Piper Kincaid feels too young to be dying. Cancer has eaten away her strength; she'd be alone but for a childhood friend who's come home by chance. Yet with all the questions of her future before her, she's adrift in the past, remembering the fateful summer she turned fourteen and her life changed...

Eve Green, pregnant with her first child, looks back on the year her mother committed suicide and she was sent to live with her grandparents in Wales, and recalls her involvement in trying to unravel the mystery of her parents, and her attempts to shelter a friend suspected in the disappearance of a local girl.