Showing results by narrator "Rebecca Lowman" in All Categories

After six years of a stolen hour here, another there, tonight is going to be different for Nick Holloway and Jenny Parrish. They’ve booked a room in a new luxury hotel in Manhattan, where they’ll spend the entire night together for the first time. Expectations are running high for this brief reprieve from ordinary life: they both need a good bout of ravishing sex and witty conversation. But that’s not what they get. Because they’ve barely gotten started when a smoke alarm goes off.

At night, Maisie Moore dreams that her life is perfect: the looming mortgages and credit card debt have magically vanished, and she can raise her four children, including newborn Esme, on an undulating current of maternal bliss, by turns oceanic and overwhelming, but awash in awe and wonder. Then she jolts awake and, after checking that her husband and baby are asleep beside her, remembers the real-world money problems to be resolved amid the long days of grocery shopping, gymnastics practices, and soccer games.

Keryth Miller is disappearing. Between the growing distance from her husband, the demands of two teenage daughters, and an all-encompassing burnout, she sometimes feels herself fading away. Actual translucence, though—that’s new. When Keryth wakes up one morning with her hand completely gone, she is frantic. But she quickly realizes two things: If she is disappearing, it’s because her father, an artist with the otherworldly ability to literally capture life in his art, is drawing her. And if he’s drawing her, that means he’s still alive.

Ammalie Brinks has just lost the three keys of her life’s purpose—her husband, her job, and her role as a mom, after her son went off to college. She’s also mystified to find herself in middle age: How exactly had that happened? The terrifying idea of becoming irrelevant, invisible, of letting her life slip away Into obscurity, has her driving distracted through Nebraska with a broken plastic fork in her tangled hair.

In her late thirties, Jane Louise Parker has just married a man whose native decency leaves her almost breathless at her good fortune. After the wedding, she returns to work at a small and tony publishing house whose finances are in disarray. Alongside her best friend, Edie, Jane Louise patiently waits to become pregnant, wondering if a baby will provide a sense of rootedness that still seems to elude her. When that longed-for child arrives, it transforms the Parkers’ lives in a way that is as unexpected as it is rapturous.