"Told entirely through the transcripts of the narrator's psychiatric sessions, this intimate portrait of grief and longing follows twenty-year-old Alicia Western as she, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, contemplates the nature of madness, her hallucinations and her own existence in 1972 Black River Falls, Wisconsin."--

"Pushing away her devoted husband, a once-successful writer moves back into her bohemian childhood home, where she struggles to come to terms with the mental illness that has overshadowed her life."-- "There's something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. At forty she spends days unable to get out of bed, and often alienates both strangers and her...

"It's 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She's immediately in awe of her employer--brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women's suffrage. Now, at age...

"Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious,...

A first-rate, beautifully-written novel about an émigré living in the States who goes back to her native South Africa to look for her missing mother-a fictional debut that will be a draw both to critics and to readers of fine, accessible fiction Set against a backdrop of South Africa's troubled history, natural beauty, and complex contemporary society, Nature Lessons is a riveting story of a forty-year-old woman, Kate Jensen, struggling to come...

In England, a housewife eggs on another to liberate herself and when the other abandons her family to travel the world pursues her with letters. The missives, a jumble of apologies, condemnation, admiration, envy and confessions of her own unhappiness, portray the loneliness and boredom of suburban life.

Finding her self-destructive tendencies spinning out of control despite an otherwise successful life, Darien is sent by her husband into therapy with Dr. Lindholm, who works to help her unlock the secrets she desperately wants to hide.

"A young woman with amnesia falls under the influence of a powerful doctor in Paris's notorious women's asylum, where she must fight to reclaim dangerous memories-and even more perilously, her sanity-in this gripping historical novel inspired by true events, from the bestselling author of Wunderland. "I didn't see her the day she came to the asylum. Looking back, this sometimes strikes me as unlikely. Impossible, even, given how utterly her arrival...

Kit Pitman is fourteen and lives in a ramshackle cottage on the outer banks of Newfoundland, where isolation is all she knows. The only visitors are fogbound fishermen and an occasional young man brought ashore to keep the bloodlines clean. But Kit's isolation is compounded by the mystery that surrounds her family and her illegitimate birth. Her mother, Josie, is mentally disabled and often runs wild among the clapboard houses that dot the shore....