Showing results for "The Story of a Mother" in Genre Fiction

Jessica has just had the wedding of her dreams, and now she's setting up a new home with her lawyer husband, Matthew. Even better - they are expecting a child. But as they paint the nursery and shop for the baby, Jessica keeps waiting for the excitement to kick in. Why isn't she transformed by maternal feelings? Where is the all-consuming love she's supposed to feel for her child?

Life is hard enough for a teenage girl in 1950s suburbia without having a mother who may—or may not—be a witch. A single mother at that. Sure, she fits in with her starched dresses, string of pearls, and floral aprons. Then there are the hushed and mystical consultations with neighborhood women in distress. The unsavory, mysterious plants in the flower beds. The divined warning to steer clear of a boyfriend whose fate is certainly doomed.

"The Story of a Mother" (Danish: Historien om en moder) is a story by the Danish poet, travel writer, short story writer, and novelist Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875). The tale was first published December 1847. The story has been made into films several times, and also adapted into an animated film using the stop-motion puppet technique. A mother has not slept for three days and nights watching over her sick child. When she closes her eyes for just a moment, Death comes and takes her child.

Colm Tóibín's Mothers and Sons is a sensitive and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each finely wrought story teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons. This is an acute, masterful and moving collection that confirms Tóibín as a great prose stylist of our time.

Three sisters. Three childhoods ruined. One chance to heal the scars of the past. After their death of their cruel and abusive mother, estranged sisters Alex, Catherine and Beth reunite once again.

Ever since Ruby was tiny, she has been unique. Her smiles are magically rare, and she likes things done in a very particular way - her blocks are always color-coded, and her toy animals stand in regimented lines. She’s also the daughter of Sara’s dreams - even on days when being a mother to a three-year-old is exhausting. Not everyone understands Ruby like Sara does though. Not Sara’s husband Mike, and certainly not her disapproving mother-in-law, Barbara. So when circumstances force their family to move in with Barbara, Sara knows it’s going to make motherhood even harder.

A daughter and mother: two women miles, years, and dreams apart. One defies traditions and expectations. The other conforms to them, even in a new land. Their emotional distance grows while the daughter, now a wife and mother herself, comes to better understand the woman she’s become and why, as she ruminates on inherited trauma, the need to forgive, and the lengths she’ll go to free herself from the past.

A collection about mothers and daughters, children lost, unborn, grown up, grown apart, and the dissonance between lovers. It exposes the silences in families and the parts of ourselves we rarely reveal. A daughter asks her mother to shut up, only to shut her up for good; an exhausted wife walks away from the husband who doesn't understand her; on holiday, lovers no longer understand each other away from home. The underlying themes of loneliness, secrets, family and displacement and also the desire to belong to someone, to some place intertwine these stories.

Olivia and David were the perfect couple with their whole lives in front of them. When beautiful baby daughter Zoe came along, their world seemed complete. But now David is dead and Olivia's world is in pieces. While she is consumed with grief, her mother-in-law Ivy is also mourning the loss of her son. Both women are hiding secrets about the man they loved. Secrets that have put the family in danger.

Herta lives a contented life until Nazi Germany invades the Netherlands. As Jews, she and her family face persecution. Across town, Julia finds herself in the midst of upheaval when her husband becomes involved in Nazi activities. Then Herta and Julia’s husbands go missing—one to hide from the Nazis, and the other to collaborate with them. As the Jewish population faces rising tension, Herta feels compelled to find a hiding place for her daughters.

Rebecca Waterhouse is just 13 when she witnesses her mother's death at the hand of her father in Seaview Cottage. But what else did she see? Years later, Rebecca's daughters Iris and Jessie know their mother will never speak of that terrible night. But when Jessie goes missing, with her gravely ill newborn, Iris realises the past may hold the key to her sister's disappearance.

For her sixth birthday, Fiona Campbell’s mother, Claire, made her a peace-sign piñata filled with wishes for a better planet instead of candy. When she got her period, her mother held a womanhood ceremony at their café and invited the neighborhood. On her 16th birthday, they celebrated with a drum circle. Fiona grew up trying to keep the impulsive Claire in check and their struggling café afloat. She plans to move out, but first she must find a way to stop a big corporation from tearing down their business and destroying her mother’s livelihood.

Hillary Jean leads an enviable life. She has a loving husband, a beautiful home, caring friends, and meaningful work planning fundraisers. Yet she’s always felt incomplete. After a DNA website emails her a match, Hillary sets out to find the daughter she gave up twenty-five years ago. But her hunger to reconnect threatens to destroy the very thing she hopes to gain.

In this haunting short story of loyalty and betrayal, a young woman in early 1900s Massachusetts discovers that in navigating her treacherous coming-of-age, she must find her voice first. For fatefully observant Adeline, growing up carries an ominous warning from her adulterous mother: don’t say a word. Adeline vows to never speak again. But that’s not her only secret. After her mother takes a housekeeping job at a lighthouse off the tip of Cape Ann, a local woman vanishes. The key to the mystery lies with Adeline, the silent witness.

School teacher Julie Barlow and her two best friends, Beth and Aggie, are looking forward to an adults only beach vacation. Julie also plans to use the time to figure out why her perfectly planned life has gone terribly amiss. They’ve barely hit the road when a frantic call from Julie’s mother hijacks their best laid plans. Uncle Tony “Lucky” Costa is missing. Always entertaining, often irresponsible, never reliable, Uncle Lucky was a favorite with her friends. For Julie, for whom he’d been a sometimes surrogate father, not so much.

Growing up in the nineties in New York City as the only child of famous parents was both a blessing and a curse for Isabelle Manning. Her beautiful society hostess mother, Claire, and New York Times bestselling author father, Ward, were the city’s intellectual It couple. Ward’s glamorous obligations often took him away from Isabelle, but Claire made sure her childhood was always filled with magic and love. Now an adult, after many false starts and the unexpected death of her mother, she faces her upcoming thirty-fifth birthday alone and on the verge of a breakdown.

Traveling alone from Miami to Port-au-Prince, our narrator finds comfort at the airport. She feels free to ponder the silence that surrounds her homeland, her mother, her aunts, and her own inner thoughts. Between two places, she sees how living in poverty keeps women silent, forging their identities around practicality and resilience. From a distance, she is drawn inevitably homeward toward her family and the glittering blue Caribbean Sea.

In Texas's Big Bend country, every man has a price. For crime lord Harry Holland and his ruthless gang of cutthroats, that price is $20,000 - a ransom demand for the kidnapped daughter of a retired Army colonel. So far, neither the Army, the Rangers, nor bounty hunters have been able to penetrate Holland's guarded fortress.

The first story collection from prize-winning author Fabio Morábito available in English, Mothers and Dogs features fifteen tales that show the emotional extremes in seemingly trivial details and quotidian situations: two brothers worry more about a dog locked in an apartment who hasn’t been fed than they do about their dying mother; when the lights go out on a racetrack, a man’s evening jog turns into a savage battle between runners; a daughter learns to draft business letters as an homage to her mother.

There is something about the number 3. The Ancient Greeks believed 3 was the perfect number, and in China 3 has always been a lucky number, and they know a thing or two. Whatever history and culture says WE think 3, a hat-trick of stories, is a great number to explore themes and literary avenues that classic authors were so adept at creating.