The Confessions of Edward Day

Literature & Fiction

Martin, Valerie

Literary

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Unfinished Novel and Other Stories

Contemporary

WEIDENFELD & NICOLSO

Trespass

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday

Two women, Chloe Dale, an artist comfortably ensconced in bucolic suburbia, and Salome Drago, a wily, seductive refugee from a country that no longer exists, confront each other in a Manhattan restaurant, and the battle lines are drawn. Toby Dale, son of the artist and ardent suitor of the refugee, is in no position to choose sides. Outside, the drumbeats for the impending invasion of Iraq drown out all argument, and those who object will soon be reduced to standing in the street. The story of two families—suspicious, territorial, naïve in their confidence that they are free of the past—Trespass unfolds with commanding force. It is a bracing, tender novel for the 21st century.

doubleday& co.

A brilliant new novel set in the bohemian, glamorous theater world of 1970s New York, by the Orange Prize-winning author of Property. It’s the 1970s in New York—rents are cheap, love is free, and with the explosion of theater venues off and off-off Broadway, aspiring actors will work for nothing in no clothes. Enter Edward Day, who wants more than anything to move an unsuspecting audience to an experience of emotional truth. But he must also contend with the drama of his own life: he is locked in a bitter rivalry with fellow actor Guy Margate, with whom he shares a marked physical resemblance and a fatal attraction to the beautiful, talented, and all-too-available Madeleine Delavergne. Edward’s pursuit of Madeleine is complicated by the fact that he owes Guy his life. In this riveting tale of paranoia, passion, jealousy, and relentless ambition, Edward will learn that the truth, in the theater as in life, is ever elusive and never inert.

The Confessions of Edward Day (Vintage Contemporaries)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Vintage

1872: the American merchant vessel Mary Celeste is discovered adrift off the coast of Spain. Her cargo is intact and there is no sign of struggle, but her crew has disappeared, never to be found. As news of the derelict ghost ship spreads, the Mary Celeste captures imaginations around the world—from a Philadelphia spiritualist medium named Violet Petra to an unknown young writer named Arthur Conan Doyle. In a haunted, death-obsessed age, the Mary Celeste is by turns a provocative mystery, an inspiration to creativity, and the tragic story of a family doomed by the sea. Based on actual events, spanning seas and continents, life and death, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste is a spellbinding exploration of love, nature, and the fictions that pass as truth.

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (Vintage Contemporaries)

United States

The twelve stories in this essential collection comprise the best of Valerie Martin’s long and distinguished career. Celebrated for her unflinching exploration of human morality and her astonishing insights into our shared losses and joys, Martin draws on an extraordinary range of genres and settings, shifting from realism to myth, from past to present, from the Louisiana bayou to the streets of Rome and beyond. In these stories, Martin mines her three literary preoccupations—animals, artists, and metamorphoses—to unforgettable effect. In “The Consolation of Nature,” a family battles a giant rat that has invaded their home. “The Open Door” follows an American poet in Rome, forced to choose between her lover and a world so new it takes her breath away. In “Et in Academic Ego,” a seventeen-year-old bayou orphan falls in love with a centaur who transforms her life. And the title story conjures up a hideous mermaid who fatally seduces a fisherman. Sophisticated, incisive, deeply felt and always surprising, Sea Lovers showcases the enduring work of an indispensable writer.

Sea Lovers: Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

Dramas & Plays

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Property

Property is Valerie Martin's powerful, startling novel set in America's deep South in the early nineteenth century: a story of freedom, both political and personal. Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon's husband's inclinations lie. This private drama is played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings.

ABACUS +

Alexandra

TITLE: ALEXANDRA By VALERIE MARTIN 1979 First Printing AUTHOR: VALERIE MARTIN PUBLISHER - (LOCATION) / COPYRIGHT: FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX, NY 1979 EDITION: First Printing stated CATEGORY: Mystery, First Edition, Rare BINDING/COVER: Hardback with dust jacket COLOR: OFF ORANGE

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

A secluded Tuscan villa, a mysterious death, a missing manuscript, a whiff of a ghost, and a smart young American woman tumbling helplessly into an unexpected affair--these are the ingredients of this beguiling and acutely observed new novel by the author of Mary Reilly. Lucy Stark--clever, pragmatic, capable--is the assistant to a best-selling but remarkably untalented writer named DV, who has spent the last several months in Tuscany searching for inspiration. One morning in Brooklyn, as Lucy sits at her desk reluctantly reading the first half of DV's latest novel, she receives a startling phone call: DV is dead, and the circumstances are suspicious. Soon Lucy finds herself in Italy, where her search for the rest of DV's manuscript leads her into the thick of various mysteries. Was DV murdered, or just the victim of his own stupidity? Was the ghost story he was writing pure fantasy, or did it hint at a darker reality? Is the devastating, married Massimo, who cares for Lucy in ways no one has before, as dangerously in love with her as she is with him? Part mystery, part romance, part meditation on the maddening but redemptive power of art, Italian Fever is a supremely satisfying novel: a funny, insightful portrait of the American abroad, and an irresistible exploration of our perpetual love affair with Italy.

Italian Fever

KNOPF

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