Agnes Scofield, the heroine of Dew's lovely, low-key period piece, can join Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Bridge at the teatable of exquisitely etched literary matrons. A respectable Ohiowidow with three grown children, Agnes is beginning to carve out anindependent middle-aged life for herself (which includes a secretlover) when, in 1947, her children all suddenly return to town. Theyhave full lives of their own, but take for granted that Mother willalways put supper on the table and never step outside her role as self-sacrificing, sexless matriarch. Dew's achievement is to captureboth Agnes'...

Set against the landscape of a turn-of-the-century small mid-western town, this is a classic story, a love story, a story of a family that readers will ache to follow into the next generation.

Robb Forman Dew's cult first novel explores themes of familial and romantic bonds as it tells the story of a woman whose husband stays behind in New England while she and their children spend the summer in her Midwestern hometown.

The Howells family are revisited in the summer of 1991. David, 18, is preparing to go to Harvard and Sarah is now 13. A young woman, Netta Breckenridge, enters the family's lives and creates a fragile domesticity for the Howells.

Now restored to print--the acclaimed second novel by the National Book Award--winning author of Dale Loves Sophie to Death and The Evidence Against Her. Claudia and Avery Parks, lovers since high school, are now in their thirties. Intelligent, charming, sympathetic, they seem to be the ideal couple, the perfect dinner-party guests, almost everything people should be--except responsible. They are causally yet cruelly oblivious to the ways in which their words and actions affect other people, most particularly their talented 11-year-old daughter, who suffers the misfortune of being treated by...

"ASTONISHINGLY MOVING...The Family Heart is a tough and challenging work, for it reminds us that empathy is a humble but radical virtue, if lived."
--USA Today
" I'm gay.' Every day, parents around the world hear those words from their children. Most are utterly unprepared for them. By writing The Family Heart, Robb Forman Dew has done such parents an extraordinary service."
--The Washington Post Book World
"TOUCHINGLY WRITTEN."
--The Boston Globe
"At the heart of this memoir lies a true epiphany: the author's sudden, galvanizing awareness of the suicidal consequences of...

After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield is tired of the routine. But how, at 51, can she establish an identity apart from what has so long defined her? Often eloquent, sometimes blunt, and always full of fire, the Scofield family is not one to keep its opinions quiet. As much as Agnes would like to, she can no more sidestep their adamant advice than she can step down as their matriarch. But, despite her reluctance to become even more entangled in the family web, Agnes is amazed to feel her life grow because of it.
In Being Polite to Hitler, Robb Forman...