The novels of Gail Godwin are contemporary classics--evocative, powerfully affecting, beautifully crafted fiction alive with endearing, unforgettable characters. Her critically acclaimed work has placed her among the ranks of Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy, and Carson McCullers, firmly establishing Godwin as a Southern literary novelist for the ages. Father Melancholy's Daughter, is widely recognized as one of the author's most poignant and accomplished novels -- a bittersweet and ultimately transcendent story of a young girl's devotion to her father, the rector of a small Virginia church, and of the hope, dreams, and love that sustain them both in the wake of the betrayal and tragedy that diminished their family.

The novels of Gail Godwin are contemporary classics -- evocative, powerfully affecting, beautifully crafted fiction alive with endearing, unforgettable characters. Her critically acclaimed work has placed her among the ranks of Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy, and Carson McCullers, firmly establishing Godwin as a Southern literary novelist for the ages. In A Southern Famiy, the celebrated author of A Mother and Two Daughters, The Finishing School, and Father Melancholy's Daughter once again explores the shattering dynamics of parents' relationships with their children and themselves. It is the story of the Quick family and the reunion that leads to tragedy -- a masterful tale of anger and pain, of love and hatred, and of the understanding that ultimately heals.

“Beautifully written and morally ambivalent, this complex tale will appeal to readers of Gene Wolfe and China Miéville.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review The city is crumbling. Clouds over Nowy Solum have not parted in a hundred years. Gods have deserted their temples. In the last days of a dying city, the decadent chatelaine chooses a forbidden lover, separating twin outcasts and setting them on independent trajectories that might finally bring down the palace. Then, screaming from the skies, a lone god reappears and a limbless prophet is carried through South Gate, into Nowy Solum, with a message for all: Beyond the city, something ancient and monumental has come awake. “A breathtaking success of a fantasy story. Find yourself a copy, brew some strong coffee, and allow your mind to be blown.” —The Arcanist “Reading it is like waking up in the wrong bed, in the wrong apartment, under the wrong sun. The strangest part is the insidious way the strangeness of Hayward’s world becomes familiar as the story progresses . . . By turns surreal, macabre and stunningly violent, The Fecund’s Melancholy Daughter is dreamlike in its strangeness and complexity. Like a dream, it is difficult to define and difficult to shake.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

To read Gail Godwin is to touch the very core of human experience. With inimitable grace and aching emotional precision, Godwin probes our own complexities in characters whose lives oscillate between success and struggle, stoic resolve and quixotic temptation, bitter disappointment and small, sacred joys. Now with Evensong, she again translates our everyday existence into soul-touching truths as she brings to brilliantly realized life the people of a small Smoky Mountain town--and a woman whose world is indelibly altered by them.

"[A] BRILLIANT, WITTY AND PROVOCATIVE NEW NOVEL." --San Francisco Chronicle As a young woman, the brilliant and eternally curious Magda Danvers took the academic world by storm. Then, to everyone's surprise, she married Francis Lake, a mild, midwestern seminarian, who has devoted his life to taking care of his charismatic wife. Now, Magda's grave illness puts their marriage to its ultimate test. Though facing her "Final Examination," Magda continues to arouse her visitors with compelling thoughts and questions. Into this provocative atmosphere comes Alice Henry, retreating from family tragedy and a crumbling marriage to novelist Hugo Henry. But is it the incandescence of Magda's ideas that draws Alice, or the secret of "the good marriage" that she is desperate to discover? For Alice, Hugo, Francis, and Magda will learn that the most ideal relationship--even a perfect marriage--doesn't come without a price.... "COMPELLING WRITING...REMARKABLY SKILLFUL...Gail Godwin shows herself to be at the height of her considerable power as a storyteller and a writer." --The Boston Globe "ONE OF HER FINEST BOOKS...It is not only a well-written story, but a mature and wise one, affirmative in its vision of love, unblinking in its portrayal of tragic loss." --Atlanta Journal & Constitution "FASCINATING...[A] BIG SUMPTUOUS BOOK...HER BEST NOVEL." --Entertainment Weekly "A BRILLIANTLY CRAFTED NOVEL, full of fun and mischief and resonating with wisdom and moral depth." --New Woman A Featured Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Gail Godwin, "a luminously written, heartbreaking book" (John Irving). Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three, Helen lost her mother, and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year-old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America, will haunt Helen for the rest of her life. This darkly beautiful novel about a child and a caretaker in isolation evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw and also harks back to Godwin's memorable novel of growing up The Finishing School. With a house on top of a mountain and a child who may be a bomb that will one day go off, Flora tells a story of love, regret, and the things we can't undo.

As Xie leads us through these works, we find Godwin's evolving heroines emerging out of lively, intense, sometimes painful dialogue with both the self - past, present, and future - and the social world of family, birthplace, culture, and friendships.

BONUS: This edition contains an Unfinished Desires discussion guide. From Gail Godwin, three-time National Book Award finalist and acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Evensong and The Finishing School, comes a sweeping new novel of friendship, loyalty, rivalries, redemption, and memory. It is the fall of 1951 at Mount St. Gabriel’s, an all-girls school tucked away in the mountains of North Carolina. Tildy Stratton, the undisputed queen bee of her class, befriends Chloe Starnes, a new student recently orphaned by the untimely and mysterious death of her mother. Their friendship fills a void for both girls but also sets in motion a chain of events that will profoundly affect the course of many lives, including the girls’ young teacher and the school’s matriarch, Mother Suzanne Ravenel. Fifty years on, the headmistress relives one pivotal night, trying to reconcile past and present, reaching back even further to her own senior year at the school, where the roots of a tragedy are buried. In Unfinished Desires, a beloved author delivers a gorgeous new novel in which thwarted desires are passed on for generations–and captures the rare moment when a soul breaks free.

PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, READING MY FATHER IS THE STORY OF A DAUGHTER COMING TO KNOW HER FATHER AT LAST— A GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE. In Reading My Father, William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem. From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.

What is the heart? We know it as not only the beating thing in our chests that sustains life, but as the wellspring of all faith, hope, and love. In this remarkable book, critically acclaimed author Gail Godwin takes us on a breathtaking journey that spans the history of human civilization, combining myth, art and religion to understand how humans have conceived of the heart through time. From the first valentine to the first stethoscope, from the Ancient Egyptians to the Buddha, from the heart of darkness to heart-to-heart talks, Godwin weaves her own stories of heartbreak and hope through it all. Inspired by the richest of lore, Godwin ultimately arrives at what every culture must discover anew: we cannot let the head alone rule our lives. In this colorful history of the organ of life itself, she discovers a template for a more heart-filled life.