In the tradition of Sue Monk Kidd and Julia Glass comes a stirring and soulful novel about an American woman accused of murdering her husband in Africa and the series of events that led her to that point, compellingly told via the alternating perspectives of her four teenage daughters. Christina Meldrum has already won praise from critics and fans with her young adult novel Madapple, which was an ALA Best Book for Young Readers in 2009 and earned starred reviews across the board. Now, in Amaryllis in Blueberry, her first adult novel, she tells the gripping story of the seemingly ordinary Slepy family—who fled their Midwestern town to do missionary work in a small village Africa. Meldrum has been an aid worker in Africa, bringing an authenticity to this richly atmospheric novel which explores many universal themes including family, religion, and culture. Meet Dick, his wife Seena, and their four daughters, each named Mary: Mary Catherine, Mary Grace, Mary Tessa, and their youngest Amaryllis (aMARYillis). Seena has felt unloved and unvalued most of her adult life, so she escapes into her books, particularly Greek mythology, to satisfy her desire to find meaning. Her life has been built on secrets and lies and she wants to protect her daughters from the truth she knows will destroy their happy home. Mary Catherine seems to be the strong, faithful one, who in deference to St. Catherine, cuts off all of her hair, but she’s also a lost soul who desperately needs love and attention. Mary Grace is the eldest and the most beautiful—the one who easily seduces but is also easily seduced, especially when she’s faced with an exotic and fascinating culture so unlike her own. Mary Tessa is the inquisitive one who claims to be the most reliable when it comes to the facts of her mother’s case, and then there’s Amaryllis, who was born with an extrasensory gift of seeing things other can’t see, of knowing when bad things are about to happen, and of telling when those who profess to know the truth are the biggest liars of them all…. Opening with the dramatic scene of Seena on trial for murdering her husband Dick, this engrossing and lyrical novel flashes back to the year before her family left for missionary work in Africa—and how the buried secrets of their past came back to haunt and heal them all.

A mesmerising novel by one of the most original writers of the twentieth century ....'Tantalising, fresh and inventive.Hoban writes about grown-up love with an extraordinarily unsentimental yearning' Literary Review

**This is a suggestive romance and contains no explicit sex scenes**Upon the death of her mother, 26 year old Leia York is left bereft and grief-stricken. An old college professor extends her an invitation to join him in one of the most beautiful, yet most dangerous, places on earth - the Amazon rainforest. She embarks on an impulsive journey, hoping to forget the sadness of her life in Chicago.Shortly after arriving in the village, Leia is among those chosen to go on a quest that is vital to the survival of the natives. The six week quest is fraught with danger, adventure, and unexpectedly: love. A love which is strictly forbidden. Will Leia respect an indigenous law that prevents her from pursuing the only love she has ever known?The Blue Amaryllis is a unique story that blends romance and adventure, while exploring the very real ecological issues threatening the Amazon rainforest and tribes within. It is a story of a proud people whose unique way of life faces extinction, and the passionate love that develops between one of their own and an outsider.

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawned--natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience--this study offers a fresh, detailed reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides an entirely new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.