When first she finds a tiny, sharp lump in her breast and then the museum where she is curator burns down, Isobel Albright realizes her reasonable, predictable life will never be the same and embarks on an empowering and humorous journey to newness

Life Before Death

Literature & Fiction

Frucht, Abby

United States

Scribner

A woman who dies giving birth to her youngest child returns nine years later to watch over the child and finds herself intervening in his life

Polly's Ghost: A Novel

The discovery of a lump in her breast and the subsequent fire in the museum where she works force a museum curator to reorder her life. Reprint.

Life Before Death: A Novel

Literary

Polly's Ghost

Genre Fiction

Thorndike Pr

Sensitively and perceptively charts the sometimes troubling, sometimes amusing relation of a young Midwestern couple, Cara and Douglas, as they grapple with problems of family, intimacy, and love and struggle toward a mutual understanding.

Are You Mine?

Grove Pr

Licorice

GROVE PRESS

Cara and Douglas, a young married couple in the Midwest, are on a reproductive adventure, a journey through love, physical intimacy, childbirth, abortion, and birth control. "A body's all you have to get through life in, " declares the impulsive, loving Cara, finding herself pregnant for a third time. Not at all sure she wants another child, she's already in love with this child, and her relationship with her unborn baby takes on the dimensions of an affair; their rapport, in the intimate space of her own body, begins to exclude her husband and her other children. Cara finds herself questioning abortion with a startling lack of bias - social, political, or religious. She must decide between disrupting the balance of her established family and her own life, and saying goodbye to a person who will never sit at her dinner table or play with her other children. Cara's spirited grappling with these problems counterpoints Douglas's compassionate analysis as they alternate between being the couple that is their marriage, and being two separate people in two separate bodies and sexes. At once a romance and a comedy of passion, Are You Mine? is an intimate map of the obstacle course of life's choices, a set of hurdles and predicaments so fraught with complication that every woman must negotiate it according to her own needs, circumstances, and desires. By the end of the book, Cara and Douglas, parents and lovers in the middle of America, have achieved an understanding that is at once amusing and troubling, but that is based above all on an affirmation of their own integrity.

Are You Mine?: A Novel

This fine debut of twelve stories explores a topography of the interior, probing the thoughts, motivations, and little-understood impulses behind moments of aggression, jealousy, and loneliness. Turning her eye on the academic landscape as well as the workaday world, Frucht keenly observes people forging friendships, groping for greater self-understanding, and attempting to find meaning in their lives and loves.
Whether writing about a couple trying to conceive a much-wanted child or a lonely husband mourning the changing political attitudes of his wife, Frucht brings her characters and their lives into memorable focus. She builds a fictional world that resonates with the immediate and the familiar.
Although many books of contemporary fiction document the ways people often fail to communicate, the essential quality of Abby Frucht's characters is that they do communicate—connect—and gain part of what they want from life as a result. These stories are never about despair without also being about hope. They speak to each other as playfully and accidentally as memories do.

Fruit of the Month (Iowa Short Fiction Award)

University Of Iowa Press

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Ticknor & Fields

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Books by Frucht, Abby

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

Life Before Death

Polly's Ghost: A Novel

Life Before Death: A Novel

Polly's Ghost: A Novel

Polly's Ghost

Are You Mine?

Licorice

Are You Mine?: A Novel

Fruit of the Month (Iowa Short Fiction Award)

Snap