Christina Schwarz

Drowning Ruth

Feeling restless in spite of her accomplishments and imminent marriage, Trudy is ostracized by her late nineteenth-century Milwaukee community when she falls in love with an enigmatic man and relocates to a California lighthouse.

A Novel

The Edge of the Earth

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Drowning Ruth vividly evokes the perennially fascinating true crime love affair of Bonnie and Clyde in this suspenseful, gorgeously detailed fictional portrait of Bonnie Parker, one of America’s most enigmatic women. Born in a small town in the desolate reaches of western Texas and shaped by her girlhood in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Dallas, Bonnie Parker was a natural performer and a star student. She dreamed of being a movie star or a singer or a poet. But her dramatic nature, contorted by her limited opportunities and her overwhelming love for Clyde Barrow, pushed her into a course from which there was no escape but death. Infusing the psychological acuity of literary fiction with the relentless pacing of a thriller, Bonnie follows Bonnie from her bright, promising youth to her final month of shoot-outs, kidnappings, and desperate car chases through America’s hinterland in the grip of the Great Depression, as the noose of the law tightened around her. Enriched by Christina Schwarz’s extensive research in the footsteps of Bonnie and Clyde and written with her powerful sense of place and time, Bonnie is a plaintive and page-turning account of a woman destroyed by a lethal combination of longing and love.

Bonnie

Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and young niece, Ruth.

Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut. Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But very soon, Amanda comes to see that her old home is no refuge--she has carried her troubles with her. On one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly everything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears and is later found drowned beneath the ice that covers the lake. When Mathilda's husband comes home from the war, wounded and troubled himself, he finds that Amanda has taken charge of Ruth and the farm, assuming her responsibility with a frightening intensity. Wry and guarded, Amanda tells the story of her family in careful doses, as anxious to hide from herself as from us the secrets of her own past and of that night. Ruth, haunted by her own memory of that fateful night, grows up under the watchful eye of her prickly and possessive aunt and gradually becomes aware of the odd events of her childhood. As she tells her own story with increasing clarity, she reveals the mounting toll that her aunt's secrets exact from her family and everyone around her, until the heartrending truth is uncovered. Guiding us through the lives of the Starkey women, Christina Schwarz's first novelshows her compassion and a unique understanding of the American landscape and the people who live on it.

Kate Morton

Douglas Kennedy

Patricia Scanlan

Thomas Keneally

Lucinda Riley

Katja Millay

Taylor Jenkins Reid

Sahar Delijani

Abigail Tarttelin

Karen Brown

Tamara N. Houston

Saira Shah

The Atria Summer 2013 Beach-Read Bag: A free collection of thirteen excerpts from novels by some of our favorite writers. There’s nothing that goes better with beach season than a delicious novel. With that in mind, we present Atria’s Summer 2013 Beach-Read Bag: a free collection of 13 excerpts from novels by some of our favorite writers. Selections include: The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally The Edge of the Earth by Christina Schwartz Five Days by Douglas Kennedy Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay Forever, Interrupted by Taylor Jenkins Reid Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin The Lavender Garden by Lucinda Riley With All My Love by Patricia Scanlon The Mouse-Proof Kitchen by Saira Shah The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown Waiting for Jules by Tamara N. Houston No matter whether you’re on a plane traveling to your getaway destination or on your couch planted firmly in front of the air conditioner, we’ve got a great story guaranteed to whisk you away on a reading vacation.

A Free Collection of Excerpts from Some of Our Favorite Writers

The Atria Summer 2013 Beach-Read Bag

Is it possible to be in love with two women at the same time? This is a question Jon has been asking himself frequently these days. He's loved his wife Ginny since the days when a chance encounter in the halls of their high school would leave him unable to speak. But recently Jon has found himself bewitched by Freddi, his colleague at the ad agency, where late-night brainstorming sessions devolve into giggles and sexual attraction. As Jon's guilt becomes all-consuming and Ginny inches closer discovery, a secret kept for thirty years threatens any hope of salvation. Weaving together past and present in a small Midwestern town, Schwarz beautifully conjures the emotional labyrinth of a marriage on the brink of collapse, and a history of love and revenge.

So Long at the Fair

Jodi Picoult

William Kent Krueger

M. J. Rose

Sarah Pekkanen

Randy Susan Meyers

Amy Hatvany

Ronlyn Domingue

Raquel Cepeda

Katherine Preston

Find your group’s next great read with Atria Book Club Bites: a free sampling of ten books guaranteed to feed your discussion. Great books, dear friends, and fascinating conversation are the key ingredients in any book club. To help you decide what to read next, dip into Atria Book Club Bites: a free sampling of ten books guaranteed to feed your discussion. You’ll find excerpts from: The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult The Comfort of Lies by Randy Susan Meyers The Book of Lost Fragrances by M.J. Rose The Mapmaker’s War by Ronlyn Domingue The Best of Us by Sarah Pekkanen Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger Heart Like Mine by Amy Hatvany The Edge of the Earth by Christina Schwarz Bird of Paradise by Raquel Cepeda Out With It by Katherine Preston Whether your club enjoys contemporary women’s fiction, stories with moral and ethical dilemmas, or a fascinating memoir, we’ve got a great book guaranteed to get you talking.

A Free Sampling of Ten Books Guaranteed to Feed Your Discussion

Atria Book Club Bites

All is Vanity

ALL IS VANITY is the second novel by Christina Schwarz, the acclaimed author of number-one bestseller DROWNING RUTH. 'A page-turner' New York Times Book Review As they reach their mid-thirties, Margaret and Letty, best friends since childhood, begin to chafe at their sense that they are not where they ought to be in life. Margaret decides to quit her job and whips out a literary tour de force. But as Letty, a stay-at-home mother of four, begins to feel pressured to make a good showing in the upper-middle-class Los Angeles society, Margaret sees a plot unfolding that's better than anything she could make up. Desperate to finish her book and hungry for acclaim, she pushes Letty to take greater and greater risks and sacrifices one of the things most precious to her... Like DROWNING RUTH, ALL IS VANITY probes into the mysteries of the human heart and uncovers the passions that drive ordinary people to break the rules in pursuit of their own desires.

All Is Vanity

From the author of Drowning Ruth, a haunting, atmospheric novel set at the closing of the frontier about a young wife who moves to a far-flung and forbidding lighthouse where she uncovers a life-changing secret. In 1898, a woman forsakes the comfort of home and family for a love that takes her to a remote lighthouse on the wild coast of California. What she finds at the edge of the earth, hidden between the sea and the fog, will change her life irrevocably. Trudy, who can argue Kant over dinner and play a respectable portion of Mozart’s Serenade in G major, has been raised to marry her childhood friend and assume a life of bourgeois comfort in Milwaukee. She knows she should be pleased, but she’s restless instead, yearning for something she lacks even the vocabulary to articulate. When she falls in love with enigmatic and ambitious Oskar, she believes she’s found her escape from the banality of her preordained life. But escape turns out to be more fraught than Trudy had imagined. Alienated from family and friends, the couple moves across the country to take a job at a lighthouse at Point Lucia, California—an unnervingly isolated outcropping, trapped between the ocean and hundreds of miles of inaccessible wilderness. There they meet the light station’s only inhabitants—the formidable and guarded Crawleys. In this unfamiliar place, Trudy will find that nothing is as she might have predicted, especially after she discovers what hides among the rocks. Gorgeously detailed, swiftly paced, and anchored in the dramatic geography of the remote and eternally mesmerizing Big Sur, The Edge of the Earth is a magical story of secrets and self-transformation, ruses and rebirths. Christina Schwarz, celebrated for her rich evocation of place and vivid, unpredictable characters, has spun another haunting and unforgettable tale.

Christina Schwarz

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