A searing, poignant, darkly comic novel set on Cape Cod by the author of the bestselling true crime story Invisible Eden.Young Alden Warrens husband has vanished without a trace. Her daily routine--working for the National Park Service at the Cape Cod National Seashore, volunteering to take care of a cantankerous old activist she met through Meals on Wheels, monitoring bird migration counts, and applying for a foster baby--provides many distractions and obstacles, but shes got bigger troubles as Miss Bride Interrupted. Alden is avidly courted but holds out emotionally--until Lux Davis, a handsome landscape worker and her husbands undetected killer, tracks her down. Lux is smitten with Alden, but his immediate problem, unknown to her, is how to dispose of the body. Lux and Alden bond strongly in the face of their mutual demons, past and current, creating a charged and magical love story. In the meantime, his secret is on the verge of being discovered as the law closes in behind him.Maria Flook finds valiant people within the working-class population of an off-season resort community. Although unsteady and disenfranchised, her characters emerge intact, buoyed by their love for one another and for the natural world, and portrayed by Flook with her signature mixture of high poetic seriousness and a ribald, picaresque sensibility (The New Yorker). Maria Flooks Invisible Eden (Broadway, 2003), a literary investigation of fashion writer and single mother Christa Worthingtons unsolved murder on Cape Cod, was a 2003 New York Times bestseller with over 75,000 copies sold. Maria Flook is the author of My Sister Life: The Story of My Sisters Disappearance (Broadway, 1999), which inspired Annie Proulx to call her one of the most powerful writers at work today.

Lux: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Flook, Maria

Humor & Satire

Little. Brown and Company

A searing, poignant, darkly comic novel set on Cape Cod by the author of the bestselling true crime story Invisible Eden.Young Alden Warrens husband has vanished without a trace. Her daily routine--working for the National Park Service at the Cape Cod National Seashore, volunteering to take care of a cantankerous old activist she met through Meals on Wheels, monitoring bird migration counts, and applying for a foster baby--provides many distractions and obstacles, but shes got bigger troubles as Miss Bride Interrupted. Alden is avidly courted but holds out emotionally--until Lux Davis, a handsome landscape worker and her husbands undetected killer, tracks her down. Lux is smitten with Alden, but his immediate problem, unknown to her, is how to dispose of the body. Lux and Alden bond strongly in the face of their mutual demons, past and current, creating a charged and magical love story. In the meantime, his secret is on the verge of being discovered as the law closes in behind him. Maria Flook finds valiant people within the working-class population of an off-season resort community. Although unsteady and disenfranchised, her characters emerge intact, buoyed by their love for one another and for the natural world, and portrayed by Flook with her signature mixture of high poetic seriousness and a ribald, picaresque sensibility (The New Yorker). Maria Flooks Invisible Eden (Broadway, 2003), a literary investigation of fashion writer and single mother Christa Worthingtons unsolved murder on Cape Cod, was a 2003 New York Times bestseller with over 75,000 copies sold. Maria Flook is the author of My Sister Life: The Story of My Sisters Disappearance (Broadway, 1999), which inspired Annie Proulx to call her one of the most powerful writers at work today.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Back Bay Books

Reckless Wedding, Maria Flook’s first collection of poems, was chosen for the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series in 1982 and it also received The Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award. The New York Times wrote: “This poet has the power to see unexpected resemblances—a wonderfully unsettling mix of sexual contamination and back-attic mustiness.”

Reckless Wedding (American Heritage Library)

Poetry

Houghton, Mifflin Company

Reckless Wedding

Houghton/Mifflin

You Have the Wrong Man

Literary

Random House Value Publishing

Obsessed with his unknown father, an ex-model for Arrow Collars, Cam, along with his stepsister, Margaret, and Margaret's boyfriend, Tracy, set out on an unpredictable journey. A first novel.

FAMILY NIGHT

Pantheon

In Open Water, Maria Flook explores the charged and eerie shoreline of Newport, Rhode Island, where Willis Pratt squanders his days running small cons. But his heart's not in it - he's obsessed with fishing-boat tragedies from his childhood and with Holly, a pretty new neighbor who is charged with arson. Their romance is interrupted when Willis is called home to care for his dying stepmother, Rennie, whose biological son wants to place her in a care facility. Willis is determined to guarantee his stepmother the death she desires, but when he arrives, Rennie sees that it is he who needs caring for - Willis quickly gets hooked on her prescription morphine. This is Maria Flook's natural ground, a harsh and sensual terrain where family debt and carnal knowledge intersect. Open Water is a confirmation of Maria Flook's remarkable talent. Caught up in the novel's unremitting current, its characters are propelled to a resolution that no one left on shore could have imagined.

OPEN WATER: A Novel

United States

Flook's stories enter the raw sanctuaries where men and women connect, and in these eight unveiled liaisons sexual desire is presented in its deepest reaches and its full human scale. In "Rhode Island Fish Company" a woman's maternal instincts run amok and kindle a startling betrayal; in "Prince of Motown" a household enters a crazed bereavement when Marvin Gaye is murdered; in "Lane" a man volunteers a point-by-point confession of threatening, bitter lust. These are only a few of the edgy coercions between men and women in stories that illuminate the moral tests and erotic pressures that tear up couples and unhinge families. In writing that is both psychologically precise and funny, relationships are worn down by carnal debts, hardships, and cold-blooded consummations, but these characters find reprieve as Flook evokes their purest motives - not just to survive, but to survive for one another.

YOU HAVE THE WRONG MAN: Stories

When Maria Flook's fourteen-year-old sister Karen disappeared from their suburban home, the author was changed forever. My Sister Life maps the story of two castaways from American suburbia who, while apart from each other, live mysteriously parallel lives. With unrelenting realism and beguiling wit, Flook gives us an intimate account of her sister's life as a child prostitute, and of their coming of age in the 1960s--that surreal and wrenching moment of baby-boomer disenfranchisement, when the sexual revolution collided with the domestic fallout from the Vietnam War. From the ocean liners and Paris vacations of their refined upbringing to the gritty peepshows and adult theaters where they find jobs, the girls flee from a beautiful and tormented matriarch with secrets of her own. Her missing sister becomes Flook's secret heroine--the sole example to follow in her journey into womanhood. The sisters live in trailer parks. They are faced with sexual assault, car thefts, and petty crimes with unpredictable men. Escaping from an abusive Vietnam vet, Karen takes her toddler to join her sister, who is herself raising a baby on her own; it is the first time they are under the same roof since their childhood. Their unorthodox reunion allows the sisters to forge a life-saving bond. My Sister Life moves beyond biography or memoir to give us an astonishing vision of an American family--an authentic testimony to the defiant, undaunted faith between two sisters who connect after years apart.

My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Crown

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

Books by Flook, Maria

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

Lux: A Novel

Lux: A Novel

Reckless Wedding (American Heritage Library)

Reckless Wedding

You Have the Wrong Man

FAMILY NIGHT

OPEN WATER: A Novel

YOU HAVE THE WRONG MAN: Stories

My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance

My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance