ONE OF THE BBC'S 100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD In Monkey Grip, Helen Garner charts the lives of a generation. Set in Australia in the late 1970s, this seminal debut novel follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne's bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. But when Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of a desperate relationship. Nora's addiction is romantic love; Javo's is hard drugs. The harder they pull away, the tighter the monkey grip. 'Smack habit, love habit - what's the...

When Sam Bax, that charming daredevil of a Boston lawyer, sails his boat into a storm off the coast of Maine, Elizabeth 'Olly' Bax, his wife and ardent sidekick, becomes a widow at the edge of twenty-seven. With no pretense of 'courage', Olly grieves, coping with the warmth and awkwardness of family ties and trying to rethink her own life. Realizing that her risks are as daring as any of Sam's -- while he chanced life and limb, Olly risks her heart -- she finds that love can take some surprising turns. Laurie Colwin depics Olly's recovery with humor, compassion, and a decided lack of...

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. It took her twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty years of reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance. In this lyrical and strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. She captures what it is like as a child and a young adult to be torn between two warring...

In her fifth and final novel, acclaimed author Laurie Colwin explores marriage and friendship, motherhood and careers, as experienced by a cast of delightfully idiosyncratic Manhattanites. At once a hilarious social commentary and an insightful, sophisticated modern romance, A Big Storm Knocked It Over stands as a living tribute to one of contemporary fiction's most original voices.

Within these fourteen hilarious and insightful tales of urban life, you'll meet: Raiford Phelps, an ornithologist who discovers new patterns of animal behavior when he meets Mary Leibnitz. Benno Morna, a temporary bachelor, free to indulge in TV, junk food, and Greenie Frenzel when his wholesome wife is out of town. Vincent Cadworthy and Guido Morris, whose elegant friendship is suddenly disrupted by Misty Berkowitz. Elizabeth Bayard, whose passion for order and civility does constant battle with her unruly loves. They are buffeted by the pressures of their jobs, imposed upon by their...

This collection of stories about love and privacy is serious, funny, tender, and alive with the elegance and spirit that characterise Laurie Colwin's work. In these stories, the reader moves among young men and women: pianists, historians, book illustrators, architects; women who are composed and inimitably sassy; and men who are magnetic, adventurous in love, or fiendishly elusive. They are people who are experiencing, often for the first time, the starting, enriching, and maddening complications of adult life.