Mary Morris, called "a marvelous storyteller" by The Chicago Tribune, returns with the finest novel in her acclaimed career--a vividly etched, engrossing story of a nation, two remarkable women, and the meaning of freedom.

Taut with tension, filled with the telling observations of place and local character that grow out of her expertise as a travel writer, House Arrest is Mary Morris's richest, most powerful novel to date.

The Night Sky is a moving novel about the solitary moral courage of a women raising a child alone and the complex resilience of family. Ivy Slovak is a jewelry designer and artist whose days are absorbed by the struggle to make an unreliable paycheck cover the needs of her infant son. Hungry for the freedom of the world outside her window, Ivy is haunted by the memory of her mother, who abandoned her when she was seven years old. She recalls the years spent with her loving but itinerant father, wandering the desert, hoping somehow to find the troubled, beautiful woman who had...

The Lifeguard combines Mary Morris's consummate craft as a storyteller with her gift for dramatic travel writing. In the title story, a teenage lifeguard sees his mystique among the girls on the beach dissolve in a panicked moment when he cannot save a child. In "The Glass-Bottom Boat," a mother on her first trip abroad learns about trust from a solicitous stranger.

The Lifeguard is a powerful collection of ten short stories that shows Morris's great sensitivity to men and women at moments of turbulence, uncertainty, and crisis.

When Tess Winterstone returns to her suburban childhood home after almost 30 years to attend a high school reunion, memories flood back, firmly shut doors open, and the betrayal by her father decades earlier comes to rest. Masterfully weaving the complexities of familial love and rosy 1950s suburban life with the dark underside of such a reality, Mary Morris movingly portrays a woman coming to terms with a warm and charming father's duplicity.