Fortune's Rocks Series

Recommended Reading Order

1. Fortune's Rocks

   • Anita Shreve

   • 590 pages
   • 21 hours of reading

   On a beach in New Hampshire at the turn of the last century, a young woman is drawn into a rocky, disastrous passage to adulthood. Olympia Biddeford is the only child of a prominent Boston couple—a precocious and well-educated daughter, alive with ideas and flush with the first stirrings of maturity. Her summer at the family's vacation home in Fortune's Rocks is transformed by the arrival of a doctor, a friend of her father's, whose new book about mill-town labourers has caused a sensation. Olympia is captivated by his thinking, his stature, and his drive to do right—even as she is overwhelmed for the first time by irresistible sexual desire. She and the doctor—a married man, a father, and nearly three times her age—come together in an unthinkable, torturous, hopelessly passionate affair. Throwing aside propriety and self-preservation, Olympia plunges forward with cataclysmic results that are the price of straying in an unforgiving era. Olympia is cast out of the world she knows, and Fortune's Rocks is the story of her determination to reinvent her broken life—and claim the one thing she finds she cannot live without. A meditation on the erotic life of women, an exploration of class prejudices, and most of all a portrayal of the throughts and actions of an unforgettable young woman, Fortune's Rocks is a masterpiece of narrative drama, beautifully written by one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.

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   1

   3.8

2. Sea Glass

   • Anita Shreve

   • 366 pages
   • 13 hours of reading

   The year is 1929 and Honora Beecher and her husband, Sexton, are just settling into a new marriage and a cottage on the coast of New Hampshire. While Honora fixes up the derelict house and searches for bits of sea glass on the beach, Sexton risks everything they own to buy the house they both love. Along with millions of other Americans, he is blindsided by the stock market crash and finds himself penniless. The only work he can find is at a nearby mill, where a labour conflict is erupting into violence. Shaken by forces they scarcely understand, Honora and Sexton try to build a marriage and home while overwhelmed by passions of every kind. Writing with the power and immediacy that have made her novels bestsellers, Shreve unfolds interlocking lives, each with its own share of love, loss and challenge. This is another gripping and unforgettable story of the human heart from one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.

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   3.6

3. The Pilot's Wife

   • Anita Shreve

   A pilot's wife is taught to be prepared for the late-night knock at the door. But when Kathryn Lyons receives word that a plane flown by her husband, Jack, has exploded near the coast of Ireland, she confronts the unfathomable-one startling revelation at a time. Soon drawn into a maelstrom of publicity fueled by rumors that Jack led a secret life, Kathryn sets out to learn who her husband really was, whatever that knowledge might cost. Her search propels this taut, impassioned novel as it movingly explores the question, How well can we ever really know another person?

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   3.6

4. Body Surfing

   • Anita Shreve

   • 320 pages
   • 12 hours of reading

   Deceptive love and stark betrayal form the icy core of this dark 12th novel from Oprah-anointed (The Pilot's Wife), Orange Prize finalist (The Weight of Water) Shreve. Set adrift at 29 by the sudden death of her second husband (her first divorced her), smart, underemployed Sydney (no last name) signs on for a quiet New England oceanfront summer of tutoring 18-year-old Julie, the intellectually slow but artistically talented and strikingly beautiful daughter of the fractious Edwards clan. The family includes Julie's brothers35-year-old Boston corporate real estate man Ben and 31-year-old M.I.T. poli-sci professor Jeffand the three children's parents. Sydney is half-Jewish, and Mrs. Edwards is anti-Semitic. Family tensions escalate when Julie disappears, then resurfaces in Montreal as the lesbian lover of 25-year-old Helene (a body surfer who frequented the beach near the Edwardses' home). Jeff and Sydney bond during their search for Julie, nights of passion leading to plans for a joyous wedding, which get very complicated when the couple returns to Edwards central

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   4

   3.3