Synopses & Reviews
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. Gabriels, 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 schools 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
From a three-time National Book Award finalist comes a literary work that shifts back and forth between the 1950s to the present, a gripping tale of jealousies and power struggles at a Catholic girls' school in North Carolina.
About the Author
Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including
A Mother and Two Daughters,
Violet Clay, Father Melancholys Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband, and
Evenings at Five. She is also the author of
The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963, the first of two volumes, edited by Rob Neufeld. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has written libretti for ten musical works with the composer Robert Starer. She lives in Woodstock, New York.
From the Hardcover edition.