Flora and Annie are off to stay with their grandparents for the summer. The girls will travel on their own from Cape Town on the bus, and Flora is proud that their mother has put her in charge. Flora loves lots of things about staying with Ouma and Oupa: swinging on the big old tree in the garden, baking with Ouma, playing with the other children from the neighbourhood. But there's one thing she doesn't like at all ... Nelson, their grandmother's large, red rooster. Little Annie isn't afraid of him, and Flora knows that she shouldn't be either. After all, she's supposed to be the grown-up one! But Flora can't help it - Nelson is scary and glary and he pecks hard. Will she overcome her fear?

One of her moms is pregnant What will this mean for a child who will soon be an older sibling? Her mothers prepare her for the big change in their family, and finally the baby arrives. The girl feels confused and ambivalent, but she grows at last toward happy acceptance of the baby and of her new status in the family.

"[A] touching picaresque journey through the deserts of the west and the landscape of memory."—Washington Post Book World

Verna Flake is fleeing Utah, a failed marriage (her husband has left her for a former beauty queen named Pinky), and the constricted yet reliable Mormon way of life. Seemingly naive but also gifted with an almost second sight for the emotional heart of things, Verna relates her adventures on the road, in Los Angeles, and eventually in Mexico, as she confronts her future and muses over her past. Reading group guide included.

"An almost Tolstoyian insight into the human plight.... A beautiful book."—New York Times Book Review

"Elegant and unexpected.... Literature at its best."—Chicago Tribune

"A tremendous coup for a first novel, for any novel. Freeman introduces us to an America of transcendental landscapes, cultures like forgotten flowers and festive, fierce cities.... Freeman brings her richest gifts to literature."—The Nation

"Purely, simply, beautiful."—Philadelphia Inquirer

From the writer whose voice Carolyn See has characterized as one of the strangest, most distinguished in American fiction writing today ("There is really nothing to compare her with, except, maybe, the austere beauty of a Japanese rock garden"), here is a richly dramatic novel about a woman struggling to make peace with herself as a mother, a lover, an artist, and a friend.
Lucy Patterson has just encountered her past in the person of a man whom she has not seen for twenty-five years. Dr. Carlos Cabrera saved the life of her infant son, and it was her love for him that compelled her to end her marriage -- the first moment in an arc of emotional turbulence and upheaval that has since defined her existence. Her past having caught up with her, Lucy has come to an isolated motel in the desert outside Las Vegas to write out her life, reexamine it, and, she hopes, find its calm center. It's a journey she is determined to make alone, but in the next room is a young woman -- a single mother, stripper, and prostitute panicked about her own life -- whom Lucy finds she cannot, and finally does not want to, ignore. A fiercely odd pair, they nonetheless become indispensable to each other in navigating the emotional terrain of their past and in finding, separately and together, clear paths into the future.
A Desert of Pure Feeling is the finest work we have yet seen from a writer whose gifts, at once lyrical and tough-minded, become vividly apparent in this penetrating and compelling story.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Judith Freeman, aus einer bauerlichen Grossfamilie stammend, erkrankt zu Beginn ihres Studiums psychisch schwer und kommt in die Psychiatrie. Gemass ihrer Devise Ohne Therapie gibt es keine Heilung" kampft sie sich durchs Leben, bis sie endlich die in der Kindheit liegende Ursache ihrer Erkrankung erkennt und genesen kann. Eine authentische und hoffnungsvolle Lebensgeschichte, die unter die Haut geh