Critics and readers everywhere stood up and took notice when Laura Moriarty's captivating debut novel hit the stores in June '03. Janet Maslin of the New York Times praised The Center of Everything as "warm" and "beguiling." USA Today compared the scrappy yet tender-hearted Evelyn Bucknow to Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It garnered extensive national attention; from Entertainment Weekly to the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, the press raved about the wisdom and poignancy of Moriarty's writing. The Book-of-the-Month Club snatched it up as a Main Selection, as did the...

A Semblance: Selected and New Poems (1975-2007) is the first selected compilation of poetry by Laura Moriarty. Drawn from her previous poetry collections and including new work, this selected demonstrates Moriarty's ability to make each lyric phrase into a portal where we find ourselves turning at once in two directions--backward, to probe the newly exposed limits in our old ways of understanding, and forward to experience a more evolved and involved attention to our world through the animated potentials she offers us. Whether examining the historically gendered gaze of art or of culture's...

In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty delivers a luminous, compassionate, and provocative look at how mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another. Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy--the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community. We see the story from Leigh's perspective, as she grapples with the hard...

In While I'm Falling, Laura Moriarty presents a compelling depiction of how one young woman's life changes when her family breaks up for good.

Ever since her parents announced that they're getting divorced, Veronica has been falling. Hard. A junior in college, she has fallen in love. She has fallen behind in her difficult coursework. She hates her job as counselor at the dorm, and she longs for the home that no longer exists. When an attempt to escape the pressure, combined with bad luck, lands her in a terrifying situation, a shaken Veronica calls her mother for help--only...

What makes a family? That's what 19-year-old Veronica is wondering. Her family have always made her feel safe and protected but that's all been snatched away from her and she's beginning to wonder if she really knows her family at all.