Sue Miller

"Compelling. . . . What Miller offers. . . is a distinctive sensibility--a candid exploration of the frail and gritty truths about trying to love without harm or reprisal."--Boston GlobeIn this riveting collection of short stories, bestselling author Sue Miller writes compellingly about a chapter in the moral history of our time. The fascinating stories featured in Inventing the Abbotts explore the treacherously shifting ground of erotic and family relationships. In the title story, a young man takes up successively with three daughters of the most fashionable family in town. Others concern a young girl in the first blush of sexual curiosity, and a stricken dowager whose seizures release a brutal and sometimes obscene candor. In one story after another, Sue Miller presents a remarkable gallery of characters, offering insight into contemporary men and women with their hungry hearts and dismayed consciences. With keen sensitivity and penetrating insight, Inventing the Abbotts will strike a chord with readers everywhere.

"Profoundly honest, shapely, ambitious, engrossing."--New York Times Book ReviewFrom New York Times bestselling author Sue Miller comes a masterful, engrossing novel about the life of a large family that is deeply bonded by the stranger in their midst--an autistic child. The whole world could not have broken the spirit and strength of the Eberhardt family of 1948. Lainey is a wonderful if slightly eccentric mother. David is a good father, sometimes sarcastic, always cool-tempered. Two wonderful children round out the perfect picture. Then the third child arrives--and life is never the same again. Over the next forty years, the Eberhardt family struggles to live with a flood tide of upheaval and heartbreak, love and betrayal, passion and pain...hoping they can someday heal their hearts. Family Pictures is an unforgettable, insightful, and resounding novel of strength and resiliency against overwhelming circumstances.

"A tour de force by any standard." --Newsweek"Miller writes with wisdom, compassion, and an almost palpable sense of reality about the ambiguous and difficult choices that . . . at one time or another, life demands of us." --Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionA convergence of family and friends stirs memories of the past in New York Times bestselling author Sue Miller's novel about the beautiful, raging, and tragic yearning for romantic love. After years of lives lived apart, Lottie Gardner, her brother, Cameron, and their old friend Elizabeth reunite in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lottie has arrived to settle the estate of her elderly mother in decline. It's also a chance to slip away from a passionless marriage in jeopardy. What she longs for is the kind of heedless romance she sees in her brother's rekindled fling with his childhood sweetheart. But Elizabeth is in the throes of a marital crisis of her own. And when blind desire culminates in a senseless tragedy, Lottie, Cameron, and Elizabeth must confront the choices they've made for love. Gripping, emotional, and unexpected, For Love explores the inevitable reconciliation of the life you dream of when young and hopeful with the reality of the one you must abide.

"Miller depicts her characters] with grace and elegance, enriching their perceptions with strands of connecting images and intertwined history. . . . A very moving book." --New York Times Book Review From bestselling author Sue Miller comes the poignant story of a mother and son that touches on the deepest concerns about love, art, family, and lifeLily Maynard is proud, chilly, difficult, and has become a famous writer at age seventy-two. Now, stricken with Parkinson's disease and staying with her architect son Alan, Lily must cope with her fading powers as well as with disturbing memories of the events that estranged her from her children and ended her marriage. For Alan, her visit raises old questions about his relationship with her, about the choices he has made in his own life, and about the nature of love, disappointment, and grief. Profound and deeply affecting, The Distinguished Guest reveals a family trying to understand the meaning of its life together, while confronting inevitable loss and the vision of an immeasurably altered future.

New York Times Bestseller"A tour de force. Sue Miller goes straight to the dark heart of the matter of modern sexual morality." -- Russell BanksSue Miller's critically acclaimed bestselling novel about a woman torn between motherhood and sexuality. Recently divorced, Anna Dunlap has two passionate attachments: her daughter, four-year-old Molly, and her lover, Leo, the man who makes her feel beautiful--and sexual--for the first time. Swept away by happiness and passion, Anna feels she has everything she's ever wanted. Then come the shocking charges that will threaten her new love, her new "family". . . and that force her to prove she is a good mother. An extraordinary, perceptive, and significant novel, The Good Mother will continue to resonate as strongly with readers today as when it was first published over thirty years ago.

Who should we save? Our family? Our friends? 2045 and the world is in chaos. Climate change, shortages of food and falling fertility are turning nations and communities into fortresses. Hope Grigori and Jude Goodman are cousins. She wants to save their whole community, he's prepared to choose the strongest and leave the rest behind. But how do you decide who's going to live? And who has the right to say one individual matters more than another? What's fair? Who's in charge? Determined to find a way through the challenges Hope sets off on a quest to find fairness for the many, not just the few. A book for anyone who's ever asked if their life was meant to turn out the way it has. Blind Spot is a prequel to 20/20 Vision: They didn't see it coming

'Brilliant' THE TIMES'A finely observed study of identity and belonging' MAIL ON SUNDAYFleeing the end of an affair, and troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for fifteen years, Frankie Rowley comes home to the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Is it an accident, or something more deliberate? During the following weeks, as Frankie comes to recognise her father’s slow failing and her mother’s desperation, and tentatively gets to know the new owner of the local newspaper, another house burns - and then another. These frightening events crack open the deep social fault lines in the town, raising questions about how and where one ought to live, and what it really means to lead a fulfilling life. What readers are saying about The Arsonist:'A stonking good read''A treat''I love Sue Miller and would recommend any of her books; she is a tremendous writer''I could not put it down''A lovely narrative that will never leave me. Five stars''I loved every page'

After fifteen years working in East Africa, Frankie Rowley returns to the New Hampshire village where her family has always spent their summers. But the tranquility she's expecting proves short lived when, on the very night she arrives, a mysterious arsonist begins targeting the homes of other summer residents. As this seemingly idyllic community becomes increasingly on edge, Frankie also has to deal with her father's declining health--and begins a passionate affair with the editor of a local paper that will yield its own remarkable risks and revelations. Suspenseful, sophisticated, and finely wrought, The Arsonist is an artfully nuanced and deeply emotional novel about a family and a community tested, about how and where one ought to live, and about what it means to lead a fulfilling life.

Richard Egües and José Fajardo are universally regarded as the leading exponents of charanga flute playing, an improvisatory style that crystallized in 1950s Cuba with the rise of the mambo and the chachachá. Despite the commercial success of their recordings with Orquesta Aragón and Fajardo y sus Estrellas and their influence not only on Cuban flute players but also on other Latin dance musicians, no in-depth analytical study of their flute solos exists. In Cuban Flute Style: Interpretation and Improvisation, Sue Miller—music historian, charanga flute player, and former student of Richard Egües—examines the early-twentieth-century decorative style of flute playing in the Cuban danzón and its links with the later soloistic style of the 1950s as exemplified by Fajardo and Egües. Transcriptions and analyses of recorded performances demonstrate the characteristic elements of the style as well as the styles of individual players. A combination of musicological analysis and ethnomusicological fieldwork reveals the polyrhythmic and melodic aspects of the Cuban flute style, with commentary from flutists Richard Egües, Joaquín Oliveros, Polo Tamayo, Eddy Zervigón, and other renowned players. Miller also covers techniques for flutists seeking to learn the style—including altissimo fingerings for the Boehm flute and fingerings for the five-key charanga flute—as well as guidance on articulation, phrasing, repertoire, practicing improvisation, and working with recordings. Cuban Flute Style will appeal to those working in the fields of Cuban music, improvisation, music analysis, ethnomusicology, performance and performance practice, popular music, and cultural theory.

'Deeply affecting ... exquisite' Washington Post'Subtle and truthful' Sadie Jones'Acutely observant ... heartbreaking' Daily TelegraphEver since her boyfriend Gus was killed in 9/11, Billy has been pretending. She finds it easier to stay silent and go through the motions of grief than tell the truth: that she was planning to leave Gus, and that his death left her feeling a mixture of ambivalence and anguish that she is still struggling to resolve. Drawing from her experience, Billy writes a play: 'The Lake Shore Limited'. The opening night brings together three people whose lives intersect and interweave with Billy's: Leslie, Gus's older sister, haunted by his death and constantly aware of what could have been; Rafe, the actor who brings the joy and sadness of his own marriage into his role; and Sam, a recently divorced man who is irresistibly drawn to Billy's distinctive, enigmatic beauty. Together these four voices create a mesmerizing novel of entanglements, connections and inconsolable losses. What readers are saying about The Lake Shore Limited:'Sue Miller at her best ... Beautiful, moving, enriching''A multi-layered story that exposes the dark and light side of the human condition''So real, intimate and honest''Dazzling''Miraculous''Sue Miller's writing is outstanding and beautiful. Definitely five stars''One of the best books I've read in a long time''I loved it''Original and transformative''I adore this book, and can't recommend it strongly enough'

Meet Billy Gertz: a fiercely independent playwright, whose newest drama imagines the story of a man waiting to hear if his estranged wife has survived a cataclysmic event. As her life touches three other unforgettable characters, Billy's play--the emotion behind its genesis and its powerful performance--forms the thread that binds them all together. A moving love story and a tale of connection and loss, The Lake Shore Limited is Sue Miller at her dazzling best.

One minute John is the cornerstone of Eva's world, rock to his two teenage stepdaughters and his own son Theo, the next he is tossed through the air in a traffic accident, and snapped like a twig. His sudden death changes everything. Eva struggles with the terror and desolation of loneliness, and finds herself drawn back to her untrustworthy ex-husband; Emily, the eldest daughter, grapples with her new-found independence and responsibility. Little Theo can only begin to fathom the permanence of his father's death. But for Daisy, John's absence opens up a whole world of confusion just at the onset of adolescence and blossoming sexuality. And in steps a man only too willing to take advantage.

At the age of seventy-two, Lily Roberts became a national celebrity on writing her first book - a spiritual memoir. But her new-found fame was not well received by her son Alan and wayward daughter Clary, both profoundly disturbed by Lily's intimate revelations about her married life. Ten years on their resentment is still raw, and when Lily, now ill and frail, comes to live with Alan, the bitter legacy of their very different memories threatens to upset the precarious balance of their lives.

Covering all the key themes, different theoretical views and approaches to studying childhood and early childhood, this book guides you through your course, telling you exactly what is expected of you throughout your studies. It will ensure you develop the skills you need to become successful, and key areas covered include: making the transition from personal experience of children, to studying childhoodmaking the most of your lectureswriting good assignmentslearning how to study independentlydeveloping your critical thinkingdrawing on the full range of student resources (people, services, research visits)getting a job in the early years sector. The new edition has been thoroughly updated and now contains: a new chapter on placements and visitsdetailed advice on how to avoid plagiarismfull consideration of multi-agency working, throughout every chapteradvice on career opportunities and further study. Designed to support students in their studies and beyond, this book is an essential purchase for anyone studying childhood or early childhood. SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, quizzes and videos on study success!

Covering all the key themes, different theoretical views and approaches to studying childhood and early childhood, this book guides you through your course, telling you exactly what is expected of you throughout your studies. It will ensure you develop the skills you need to become successful, and key areas covered include: making the transition from personal experience of children, to studying childhoodmaking the most of your lectureswriting good assignmentslearning how to study independentlydeveloping your critical thinkingdrawing on the full range of student resources (people, services, research visits)getting a job in the early years sector. The new edition has been thoroughly updated and now contains: a new chapter on placements and visitsdetailed advice on how to avoid plagiarismfull consideration of multi-agency working, throughout every chapteradvice on career opportunities and further study. Designed to support students in their studies and beyond, this book is an essential purchase for anyone studying childhood or early childhood. SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, quizzes and videos on study success!

Lottie is relieved to have escaped to her mother's house for the summer because her second marriage, barely begun, is in trouble. Also at home is Cameron, Lottie's brother, who has been in love with their neighbour Elizabeth since high school. Elizabeth is married with three children but now, finally, Elizabeth and Cameron embark on a passionate affair. But as Lottie, Cameron and Elizabeth are reunited, a senseless tragedy befalls them.

Catherine Hubbard is at a crossroads in her life. Twice divorced, she has three children who are now grown up and scattered. Then news comes that she has inherited her grandmother Georgia's home in Vermont. There, Catherine finds not only the ghosts of her own past but those of Georgia as well, whose diaries reveal a deep secret and a tragic misunderstanding.

Maybe some people just like to keep things private. Secret, I guess you'd say. Love came late to Meri, but in a rush: she met Nathan at thirty-six, he moved in a month later, and they married a month after that. Now they are moving to New England and a house of their own - a new life that Meri is not sure she even wants. She loves her husband, but feels there may be trouble ahead. Nathan, however, is boyishly excited that their next-door neighbour is the eminent Senator Tom Naughton, a political hero of his, now in his seventies. The Senator is nowhere to be seen, but Meri strikes up an unexpected friendship with his wife, the elegant Delia, sensing that she has much to learn from her - about marriage, love and motherhood. But soon she comes close to a terrible breach of trust that could ruin everything.