This story of a small-town girl with more romance in her soul than she can ever hope to express and a rich imagination is the first novel from Jane Hamilton. It portrays the potentially cruel and violent side of family life as well as the indomitable spirit of Ruth.

Frogs Are Still Singing

Literature & Fiction

Jane Hamilton

Contemporary

Fontana Press

4 cassettes / 4 hours Read by Robert Sean Leonard "Jane Hamilton has removed all doubt that she belongs among the major writers of our time." --San Francisco Chronicle Set in Jane Hamilton's signature Midwest, The Short History of a Prince is the story of Walter McCloud and his ambition to become a great ballet dancer. With compassion and humor, and alternating between Walter's adolescent and adult voices, the novel tells of Walter's heartbreak as he realizes that his passion cannot make up for the innate talent that he lacks. Introduced as a child to the genius of Balanchine and the lyricism of Tchaikovsky by his stern but cultured aunt Sue Rawson, Walter has dreamed of growing up to shine in the role of the Prince in The Nutcracker. But as Walter struggles with the limits of his own talent and faces the knowledge that Mitch and Susan, his more gifted friends, have already surpassed him, Daniel, his older brother, awakens one morning with a strange lump on his neck that leads to fearful consequences--and to Walter's realization that a happy family, and a son's place in it, can tragically change overnight. The year that follows will in fact transform the lives not only of the McClouds but also of Susan, who becomes deeply involved with the sick Daniel, and Mitch, the handsome and supremely talented dancer with whom Walter is desperately in love. Into this absorbing narrative Hamilton weaves a place of almost mythical healing, the family's summer home at Lake Margaret, Wisconsin, where for generations the clan has gathered on both happy and unhappy occasions. Only a writer of Jane Hamilton's sensitivity and humanity could do justice to this moving story of the torments of sexuality and the redemptive power of family and friendship. This book confirms her place as a preeminent novelist of our time.

The Short History of a Prince

Genre Fiction

Random House Audio |

Disobedience

Alfred.A. Knopf

When Madeline Was Young

Black Swan.

The Book of Ruth

First published as "The Frogs are Still Singing" in 1988, this novel won 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel. It is the story of Ruth, who grows up and struggles to survive in small-town America. From the author of "A Map of the World".

The Short History Of A Prince A Novel

As a teenager in Oak Ridge, Illinois, Walter McCloud is desperate for adventure, hoping for love and success as a dancer. "If life for Walter was composed in part of confusion, shame and deception, the ballet was order, dignity and forthright beauty." In 1995, at 38, nothing has turned out as he had expected. Having spent years working in a dollhouse shop in New York and engaging in that city's ready sexual excitement, Walter finally returns to his Midwestern roots, accepting a teaching job in Otten, Wisconsin--a place that might have little to recommend it save its proximity to his family's summer home. ("It had taken Walter several years to admit to himself that he couldn't go on indefinitely selling Lilliputian Coke bottles and microscopic toilet-roll dowels.") In this new community, he will have to keep his head down, a stance that has long suited him, because he prefers to hold one memory of lost intimacy and perfection in high, private relief. \n\nWalter's exile, or new start, allows memory to come to the fore, particularly that painful year in which his brother was dying of Hodgkin's and he and his fellow dancers were dying for experience. Jane Hamilton explores the distance between desire and reality, satisfaction and secrecy, irresistibly alternating between past and present. At first, we can't wait for Walter to break through, and it's tempting to race through her prince's history--one which is, happily, not that short. But to do so would be to miss out on Hamilton's fine major and minor characters and her exploration of competition, complicity, and silence. At one point, Walter fears that his pupils have "no clue that there was pleasure to be found in observing character. They seemed to be afraid to look around themselves and find a world every bit as amusing, ridiculous and unjust as Dickens's London..." Hamilton's readers, however, will find this pleasure in abundance.

Reading someone else's e-mail is a quiet, clean enterprise. There is no pitter-pattering around the room, no opening and closing the desk drawers, no percussive creasing as you draw the paper from the envelope and unfold it . . . In and out of the files, no trace. It could be the work of a ghost, this electronic eavesdropping. Seventeen-year-old Henry Shaw learns of his mother's passionate affair when he stumbles across her e-mail correspondence with her lover. His image of her is shattered, but he cannot resist his electronic eavesdropping. Henry's younger sister, Elvira, is scornful of technology, stuck as she is in 1862 with her Civil War infantry regiment. For Elvira, much to her mother's sorrow and her historian father's pride, is a hardcore Civil War re-enactor. Displaced from Vermont to Chicago, each member of the Shaw family finds their dreams hard to realize and their expectations of life turned on their head. Disobedience is a compassionate, sharp, wicked and utterly contemporary novel about families, love and loyalty by a major literary talent.

A Map Of The World (Large Print Edition)

Literary

Anchor Books

The Book Of Ruth

Mare Winningham

Simon & Schuster Audio

A Map of the World

Unabridged Audio CD with 15 CD's for a total running time of 17.25 hours. Read by C.J. Critt and Frank Muller.

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Books by Jane Hamilton