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Audiobooks by Mary McGarry Morris
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A gripping coming-of-age novel with a murder at its heart and a heroine as unforgettable as Harper Lee's Scout
Light from a Distant Star is the moving and powerful story of innocence and betrayal told in the endearingly wise voice of thirteen-year-old Nellie Peck. It is early summer, and her beloved father's business is failing. Her mother has to go back to work, and Nellie's older half sister has launched a troubling search for her birth father. Forced to take care of her shy younger brother, Nellie is determined to make him'and herself'toughen up. Three strangers enter Nellie's protected life: mysterious and brutish Max Devaney works in her grandfather's junkyard, the thieving Bucky Saltonstall has just arrived from New York City, and Dolly Bedelia, a young stripper who rents the small apartment in the back of the Pecks' house, becomes the titillating focus of Nellie's eavesdropping.
Nellie is justly proud of her own infallible lie detector until violence erupts in her young life and she is silenced by fear and scandal. The truth as she believes it is shocking and unthinkable, and with everyone's eyes riveted on her in the courtroom, Nellie finds herself compromised by moral confusion. No one will listen, no one believes her, and a man's life hangs in the balance.
A stunning evocation of innocence lost, Light from a Distant Star stands as one of the most engaging novels yet from the bestselling author of Songs in Ordinary Time.
'Elegant prose, beautifully drawn characters, and perfect pitch dialog'Light from a Distant Star is a wonderful, powerful novel not to be missed.''Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author
Aubrey Wallace is the kind of man no one notices. Dotty Johnson is the kind of woman no one can ignore. One afternoon, they both disappear from the small Vermont town where they live. The next day, two hundred miles away, a toddler is snatched from her Massachusetts home. For the next five years, Aubrey, Dotty, and the kidnapped child - bound together by strange love and desperate need - are trapped in a nomadic existence governed by their constant fear of discovery. Canny, the little girl, becomes Aubrey's entire existence. But Dotty wants out. She is tired of being saddled with this fearful little man. When she meets Jiggy Huller, a brutal ex-convict, the wheels of Canny's return to her natural parents are wrenched fatally into motion.
Martha Horgan is not like other women. She stares. She has violent crushes on people. She can't stop telling the truth. Martha craves love, independence, and companionship, but her relentless honesty makes her painfully vulnerable to those around her: Frances, her wealthy aunt and begrudging guardian; Birdy, who befriends her, then cruelly rejects her; and Colin Mackey, the seductive man who preys on her desires. Confused and bitter, distrusting even those with her best interests at heart, Martha is propelled into a desperate attempt to gain control over her own life. The sense of impending calamity is almost unbearable in this portrait of a woman who teeters on the edge of madness.
'Morris's magnanimous ability to portray her characters with so much tenderness and cruelty may be her novel's finest strength.' (Boston Sunday Globe)
From the Cassette edition.
Mary McGarry Morris, one of America's finest writers and the author of Songs in Ordinary Time and A Dangerous Woman, presents this riveting new novel that explores the irreparable consequences of one family's crimes of the heart.
Songs in Ordinary Time is set in the summer of 1960 - the last of quiet times and America's innocence. It centers on Marie Fermoyle, a strong but vulnerable woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for the dangerous con man Omar Duvall. Marie's children are Alice, seventeen - involved with a troubled 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 only he knows about Duvall. Among a fascinating cast of characters we meet the children's alcoholic father, Sam Fermoyle, now living with his senile mother and embittered sister; Sam's meek brother-in-law, who makes anonymous "love" calls from the bathroom of his ailing appliance store; and the Klubock family, who - in complete contrast to the Fermoyles - live an orderly life in the perfect house next door. An Oprah Winfrey Book Club pick.
Fiona Range's thirty years have been the battleground between her good upbringing and the innate recklessness she defiantly attributes to the beautiful Natalie, the young unwed mother who abandoned her in infancy. Most of Fiona's troubles seem to be kindled by a mix of the wrong men and the excesses of her kind heart. Finally rejected by the embarrassed and highly regarded Hollis family who raised her, Fiona has spent the last weeks of summer trying to get her life in order. But it takes only a single careless night to further condemn her in the eyes of the community. Finding herself even further estranged from relatives and friends, Fiona is drawn to the one man who wants nothing to do with her. He is her rumored father, Patrick Grady, so cruel and unstable that her Aunt Arlene and Uncle Charles Hollis fear for her safety. But, as always, Fiona will listen to no one. Determined to make Grady acknowledge their relationship, she pursues him in spite of his threats and increasingly erratic behavior. This is a deeply moving and hauntingly tragic tale of goodness undermined by guilt, of obsession, and of the twisted bond of betrayal committed in the name of love.
Abandoned by his beautiful wife, Irene, Henry and their two young children, Thomas and Margaret, spend that summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. Henry, an itinerant butcher, struggles to provide for them, but often must leave them alone as he travels the county in search of work. He has not told the children why their mother left or if she'll return. When Mrs. Phyllis Farley, a prosperous neighbor, begins to woo the children as companions for her strange, housebound son, Henry must weigh an unusual proposition, the consequences of which may cost him everything.
At the age of eighteen, a young man is convicted for the murder of a woman during a robbery and sent to a high security prison. Twenty-five years later, he is finally set free, a changed man painfully entering a changed world. He emerges into a society that has grown unfamiliar and corrupt, his many years inside prison leaving him unprepared for the world beyond the gates. Unsure of the new rules of society, he is subject to the hidden motivations of those around him, the plans that his friends and family may or may not have for him. This is a darkly compelling story of how one man struggles to mend the gap that his crime and incarceration have torn in his life, coming to grips with the hole gouged in his personal universe.
Martha Horgan is unpredictable, obsessive, and "different." Townspeople pity the strange young woman, but they are also frightened by her. Ruth Ann Phimister's narration gives full voice to Martha's collision course through life. A Dangerous Woman was made into a major motion picture and chosen as one of the best books of the year by the editors of ALA Library Journal and Time magazine.
