Mary Gordon

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is an unflinching and deeply sympathetic portrait of a woman destroyed by self and circumstance. First published in 1955, it marked Brian Moore as a major figure in English literature (he would go on to be short-listed three times for the Booker Prize) and established him as an astute chronicler of the human soul. Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a cert...

When Isabel Moore's father dies, she finds herself, at the age of thirty, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting chal...

In the four novellas that make up this absorbing and exquisite collection, Mary Gordon offers beautifully rendered, deeply psychological stories about the relationships between Americans abroad and Europeans in the U.S., historical and contemporary. Here we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her last days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy ...