Charlotte Templeton has lived a comfortable and safe life for the past twenty-five years as the manager of a women's pro shop on a prestigious golf course outside of Boston. She loves her job and her home, a small cottage on the grounds of the course. Although no stranger to tragedy and loss, Charlotte is devastated to learn that her near-perfect world is coming to an end as the golf course comes under new management. Duncan Kirk, reeling from the wreckage of a personal disaster, finds himself in a place he thought he would never return--his hometown of Lobster Claw, Maine. Charlotte’s and Duncan’s worlds converge during a violent nor’easter, and from that point, their lives are never the same; Charlotte questions if this little coastal town was the right move for her, and Duncan feels that his life is coming apart, and wonders if Lobster Claw will be able to put it back together? The collision of their worlds sets the stage for Charlotte and Duncan to fulfill promises and dreams and create an unexpected future.

What happens when a former Zen Buddhist monk and his feminist wife experience an apparition of the Virgin Mary? “This book could not have come at a more auspicious time, and the message is mystical perfection, not to mention a courageous one. I adore this book.”—Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit Before a vision of a mysterious “Lady” invited Clark Strand and Perdita Finn to pray the rosary, they were not only uninterested in becoming Catholic but finished with institutional religion altogether. Their main spiritual concerns were the fate of the planet and the future of their children and grandchildren in an age of ecological collapse. But this Lady barely even referred to the Church and its proscriptions. Instead, she spoke of the miraculous power of the rosary to transform lives and heal the planet, and revealed the secrets she had hidden within the rosary’s prayers and mysteries—secrets of a past age when forests were the only cathedrals and people wove rose garlands for a Mother whose loving presence was as close as the ground beneath their feet. She told Strand and Finn: The rosary is My body, and My body is the body of the world. Your body is one with that body. What cause could there be for fear? Weaving together their own remarkable story of how they came to the rosary, their discoveries about the eco-feminist wisdom at the heart of this ancient devotion, and the life-changing revelations of the Lady herself, the authors reveal an ancestral path—available to everyone, religious or not—that returns us to the powerful healing rhythms of the natural world.

This exquisite prose debut from a prize-winning poet is a poignant exploration of the author’s experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time’s passage. “Enchanting.... Zarin knits her stories together with an appealing and deeply intimate voice.” —Boston Globe Zarin charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments in a long-vanished New York City. By the end, whether describing a newlywed journey to Italy, a child’s life-threatening illness, Mary McCarthy’s file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons.