One family's secrets, betrayals, and hopes, woven together through four generations into a brilliant tapestry of memory and love. . Margaret Neal, a junior at Harvard, drops out after discovering she is pregnant. At loose ends, and feeling like a disgrace to her parents and to herself, she has to get away. For the money to buy a ticket out of town, she appeals to her Aunt Nell, the family matriarch, a no-nonsense ex-schoolteacher who seems to have nothing in her life but her cat, her daily bran cereal and prunes, a big old house full of stuff nobody wants, and relatives who covet her money. But when Nell sends the check she also encloses a gift-an odd but cherished souvenir that will lead to the revelation of a series of truths about the family's long and haunted history. A warm, humorous novel of unforgettable power and grace, Souvenir of Cold Springs tumbles backwards in time, from 1987 to 1938, through the voices of four generations of women in an extended family. Peeling away the layers, bit by bit, these women tell interlocking stories that uncover the painful events that arose from one impulsive act buried deep in the past, and from the misconceptions, rationalizations, and outright lies that followed. Through this expansive exercise of memory, we come to see that this family, like all families, is a rich accumulation, each generation echoing and deepening the experiences of those who have come before them.

Betsy Ruscoe, a single university professor in her mid-30s, is pregnant, and the man she thought she loved is not interested in fatherhood. At the same time, her dying mother begs Betsy to find the woman who gave her up for adoption at birth fifty years ago and then disappeared. Betsy struggles to cope with the changes in her life as she also sets out on a quest to uncover her mother’s surprising history.

Emily Lime and her equally palindromic dog, Otto, live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (zip code 11211), in a warm community of friends and fellow artists. Her life becomes more complicated when she falls in love with Marcus, a dog-walker and fellow Scrabble nut, whose father is Emily’s shady ex-husband who wants the lovable Emily dead. A mystery unravels, a valuable lost cache of paintings is found, and Emily’s life changes in ways she could not have anticipated.

The Writing Master, a work of historical fiction set in 1856 in New Haven, Connecticut, is about Charles Cooper, a penman-teacher of handwriting-who is attempting to come to terms with his tragic past, and Lily Prescott, an unconventional woman with her own troubled story. When a brutal murder takes place just outside the city, Charles becomes involved in its solution.

Robert Sinclair and his wife, May, move to New York City's Gramercy Park area at the height of the Great Depression. Robert is a playwright, May an aspiring actress. As Robert attempts to begin his career and to keep the love of his glamorous wife, he also struggles to overcome the insomnia that plagues him--though, paradoxically, it's on his solo night walks around the city that his best ideas come to him. But finally, desperate for a good night's sleep, he consults Mrs. Amalfi, the Sleep Specialist, who has her own mysterious past. As a background to these characters' stories is the enigmatic Orson Price--with whom Robert has a final encounter that will change his entire life. Kitty Burns Florey is the author of nine previous novels as well as the nonfiction best-seller SISTER BERNADETTE'S BARKING DOG. THE SLEEP SPECIALIST, based on family stories she heard from her parents, who were married in 1933, brings to life a difficult but amazingly vibrant and hopeful period in American history.

A chance encounter on a train leads painter Christine Ward to wonder whether Orin Pierce, her beloved college friend, believed dead for two decades, may actually be alive. As she begins to track down the man she believes he might be, she finds herself in the grip of a troubling past she thought she had come to terms with. In her search through the tangles of truth and illusion, memory and dream, she questions her roles as lover, mother, artist, and mourner of the dead. This haunting literary thriller is an uncompromising portrait of a contemporary woman in crisis.

The world of this novel moves back in time as the layers are peeled away to reveal the truth about a long-ago family tragedy that impacts the characters’ lives for years after. Beginning with a young college student haunted by her own choices and ending with the surprisingly serene image of an aging woman looking back on her turbulent life, the story encompasses a panorama of events set against the changing social backdrop of the middle years of the 20th century.

Cordelia Miller, an endearing young misfit in a scholarly, cultured family, loves junk food, TV, and the son of the local grocer. Her attempt to escape her stifling background and find her way in the world takes her on a classic journey from innocence to experience. She encounters a varied cast of characters—some comic, some calamitous—and, in the end, discovers her true vocation.  

Rosie Mortimer, celebrity gardener with a successful TV show, has a pleasantly uneventful life with her undemanding beau. Her gay son and his partner live nearby. When her estranged daughter, Susannah, product of a fractured family, returns to Rosie’s Connecticut town with her husband, a former priest, to open a restaurant, the tense relationships among these three build to a near-tragedy. Rosie is forced to face the mistakes and failures that have plagued her—and Susannah, who has her own demons, learns to forgive.

Dorrie Gilbert, a potter who lives alone, is completely unprepared for motherhood when her oddball, overweight, and orphaned nephew, Hugo, comes to live with her, demanding to know the truth about his parents and horrified that she doesn’t own a television so he can watch the soap opera he’s devoted to. As Dorrie and Hugo attempt to work things out, each learns some hard and surprising, but deeply satisfying truths about real life.

In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: "It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked." Now, in this offbeat history, Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon, including its humble roots at the Brooklyn Polytechnic, its "balloon diagram" predecessor, and what diagrams of famous writers' sentences reveal about them. Along the way Florey offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar. Charming, fun, and instructive, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog will be treasured by all kinds of readers, from grumpy grammarians and crossword-puzzle aficionados to students of literature and lovers of language.