Carbondale, Illinois. 1958. For widowed Tessie Lockhart, booking two seats on a passenger train to Florida symbolizes a fresh start, far from her memories of love and loss. For Tessie’s teenage daughter Dinah, who misses her father terribly, the move to Gainesville means a new school and the painful ordeal of making new friends. Rich, popular Crystal Landy is one of the first girls Dinah meets—and it will be Crystal, along with her exquisite mother, Victoria, who will transform the Lockharts’ lives in ways they never could have imagined. For as war and change come to this small southern town, the bonds between mothers and daughters will be tested, friendships sealed, secrets revealed, and relationships forever altered by the turbulence of the coming decades. Wise, moving, and warmly funny, The Orange Blossom Special, spans twenty years in the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters. Betsy Carter has crafted a powerful, richly rewarding novel about growing up, moving on, and turning strangers into friends.

The Orange Blossom Special: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Carter, Betsy

Dramas & Plays

Dell

Sometimes to be who you really are, you have to pretend you’re already who you want to be. At two, Delores’s mother dropped her into the shallow end of a lake, trusting instinct would teach her daughter to swim. From then on, the water is where Delores Walker feels most at home. Now, nearly seventeen, she’s boarding a Greyhound bus leaving the Bronx for sunny Weeki Wachee Springs, a tacky roadside attraction in the shadow of Walt Disney’s new Florida phenomenon. With a hundred silver dollars left behind by her runaway dad, Delores is chasing her dream of being a mermaid with a group of other aquatic hopefuls—girls just as awkward and uncertain out of water as they are beautiful and graceful in it. And in this make-believe world of sequined tails and amphibious fantasy, Delores will learn some very real lessons about growing up and surviving in a world where everyone sometimes feels like a fish out of water. A heartfelt novel of coming-of-age no matter what age you are, populated with characters offbeat, outcast, and thoroughly lovable, Swim to Me is filled with the kind of wise magic that’ll have you believing in the impossible before the final page.

Swim to Me: A Novel

United States

Bantam Discovery

Sometimes to be who you really are, you have to pretend you’re already who you want to be. At two, Delores’s mother dropped her into the shallow end of a lake, trusting instinct would teach her daughter to swim. From then on, the water is where Delores Walker feels most at home. Now, nearly seventeen, she’s boarding a Greyhound bus leaving the Bronx for sunny Weeki Wachee Springs, a tacky roadside attraction in the shadow of Walt Disney’s new Florida phenomenon. With a hundred silver dollars left behind by her runaway dad, Delores is chasing her dream of being a mermaid with a group of other aquatic hopefuls—girls just as awkward and uncertain out of water as they are beautiful and graceful in it. And in this make-believe world of sequined tails and amphibious fantasy, Delores will learn some very real lessons about growing up and surviving in a world where everyone sometimes feels like a fish out of water. A heartfelt novel of coming-of-age no matter what age you are, populated with characters offbeat, outcast, and thoroughly lovable, Swim to Me is filled with the kind of wise magic that’ll have you believing in the impossible before the final page. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Swim to Me

Orange Blossom Special, The

Contemporary

Piatkus Books

Successful and smart, Betsy Carter was not only the ultimate New York Woman, she was also founder of a magazine by that name. For nearly 20 years she led a life that others only dream oftravel, power, fashion, partiesuntil things started to go terribly wrong. Carter faced a series of catastrophes: a devastating car accident, a failed marriage, a house that burned down. Then her magazine folded, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Somehow, though, through sheer perseverance, optimism, and a keen sense of the absurd, Betsy Carter kept going, and lived to tell about it.

Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Hyperion

Successful and smart, Betsy Carter was not only the ultimate "New York Woman," she also founded a magazine by that same name. For nearly 20 years, she led a high-gloss life that others only dream of -- travel, fashion, parties, power -- until things started to go terribly wrong. Carter faced a series of catastrophes: a devastating car accident, a failed marriage, a house that burned down. Then her magazine folded and she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
This moving story, set against the gossipy and often hilarious world of magazine publishing, reveals what it is like to be stripped bare, to wander through the rubble, and to finally put yourself together again.

This is the story of unlikely heroes: the lively‚ beautiful Flora and her husband‚ the brooding‚ studious Simon‚ two immigrants who were each sent to America by their families to find better lives. An improbable match‚ the

The Puzzle King

Genre Fiction

Thorndike Press

For fans of The Nightingale and Brooklyn, an exquisite novel about friendship, love, and redemption in a circle of immigrants who flee Europe for 1930s-era New York City. With her uncanny ability to create indelible characters in unforgettable circumstances, Carter's gorgeous novel will resonate with anyone who has ever felt adrift and longed for home.

We Were Strangers Once

Thorndike Press Large Print

From the bestselling author of We Were Strangers Once, a quirky, charming, and darkly comic historical novel set in the 1950s about three generations of women whose lives are changed when a mysterious stranger comes to town--for fans of Fannie Flagg and Edward Kelsey Moore. As a young woman, Geraldine Wingo was a fiery beauty, turning heads in her small upstate New York town where she and her husband, Earle, run a popular bakery. All that changed, however, once she became pregnant with Emilia Mae, a difficult baby Geraldine is convinced is marked by the devil's tongue. Emilia Mae spends her life seeking and losing love in all the wrong places, so she never expects it to come sailing into town one day on a breeze when she's a thirty-three-year-old single mother. But Dillard Fox is no ordinary stranger--Emilia Mae and her daughter, Alice, are immediately drawn to his quiet friendliness, the brown tweed cap he never removes, his slow North Carolina drawl, and his talent for music. There's no question he's hiding a mysterious past, but will that stop them from building a new family together? Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn is a love story about creating a family where there was none, and about the enduring power of the human spirit. It is about impossible love and building a self when you start out empty. With all the charm and brightness and wisdom that Carter is known for, Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn is an unforgettable, magical new book from a beloved author.

Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn

Literary

"Carter's warm and beautiful prose brings us love, tragedy, mystery and hope in a moving celebration of America and the people who have come to it."--Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of Lucky Us and Away For fans of The Nightingale and Brooklyn comes an exquisite and unforgettable novel about friendship, love, and redemption in a circle of immigrants who flee Europe for 1930s-era New York City. On the eve of World War II Egon Schneider--a gallant and successful Jewish doctor, son of two world-famous naturalists--escapes Germany to an uncertain future across the sea. Settling into the unfamiliar rhythms of upper Manhattan, he finds solace among a tight-knit group of fellow immigrants, tenacious men and women drawn together as much by their differences as by their memories of the world they left behind. They each suffer degradations and triumphs large and small: Egon's terminally acerbic lifelong friend, bestselling author Meyer Leavitt, now wears a sandwich board on a New York street corner; Catrina Harty, the headstrong daughter of a dirt-poor Irish trolley driver, survives heartbreak and loss to forge an unlikely alliance; and Egon himself is forced to abandon his thriving medical practice to become the "Cheese Man" at a Washington Heights grocery. But their spirits remain unbroken, and when their little community is faced with an existential threat, these strangers rise up together in hopes of creating a permanent home. With her uncanny ability to create indelible characters in unforgettable circumstances, bestselling author Betsy Carter has crafted a gorgeous novel that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt adrift and longed for home.

Grand Central Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Carter, Betsy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Carter, Betsy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Carter, Betsy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Orange Blossom Special: A Novel

Swim to Me: A Novel

Swim to Me

Orange Blossom Special, The

Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist

Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist

The Puzzle King

We Were Strangers Once

Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn

We Were Strangers Once