Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

After her ex-husband dies in a plane crash, Martha Gaver is horrified to learn that the executor of Raymond's estate is Charlie, the conservative, insufferable lawyer who represented Raymond in their bitter divorce. Yet soon after they reenter each other's lives, Martha, Charlie, and their teenage children find they have more in common than they imagined as they struggle to rebuild their lives...and that opposites really do attract. Engaging,, witty, and entertaining, Domestic Pleasures is a touching, piercing tale of love lost, found, and embraced once again.

In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett—an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion. "With wit and dry humor...quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Chambers' language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details."--The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape. That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen’s gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives…with unimaginable consequences. Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.

DIVDIVAn unforgettable collection of essays on the everyday thrills and challenges of marriage and motherhood, from one of America’s best-loved memoirists/divDIV /divDIVWitty and insightful, Domestic Affairs is an extension of Joyce Maynard’s celebrated, widely syndicated newspaper column of the same name that ran from 1984 to 1990. Each essay gives an unfiltered look at the ups and downs of family life and a remarkable window into the challenges of modern motherhood. Topics range from babysitter woes to family visits to coping with a child’s burgeoning independence. These collected writings represent nine years’ worth of stories about the greatest adventure of Maynard’s life, or, as she writes, “the difficult, exhausting, humbling, and endlessly gratifying business of raising children, of ensuring the health of both body and soul.”/divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Joyce Maynard including rare photos from the author’s personal collection./div/div

Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

Domestic Pleasures or the Happy Fire-side by Frances Bowyer Vaux is about the small yet cozy Bernard family as they think of ways to help those of lesser fortune. Excerpt: "When I was a child, if a new book were given to me, I recollect, my first question invariably was:—"Is this true." If the answer were in the affirmative, the volume immediately assumed, in my eyes, a new value, and was pursued with far greater interest than a story merely fictitious. Now, as I am very desirous that you should take up this little volume with a prepossession in its favor, I must inform you, that the characters of the children here portrayed are all real characters."