A lyrical and thought provoking novel perfect for book clubs, The Orphan Sister by Gwendolyn Gross questions the intricacies of nature and nurture, and the exact shape of sisterly love… Clementine Lord is not an orphan. She just feels like one sometimes. One of triplets, a quirk of nature left her the odd one out. Odette and Olivia are identical; Clementine is a singleton. Biologically speaking, she came from her own egg. Practically speaking, she never quite left it. Then Clementine’s father—a pediatric neurologist who is an expert on children’s brains, but clueless when it comes to his own daughters—disappears, and his choices, both past and present, force the family dynamics to change at last. As the three sisters struggle to make sense of it, their mother must emerge from the greenhouse and leave the flowers that have long been the focus of her warmth and nurturing. For Clementine, the next step means retracing the winding route that led her to this very moment: to understand her father’s betrayal, the tragedy of her first lost love, her family’s divisions, and her best friend Eli’s sudden romantic interest. Most of all, she may finally have found the voice with which to share the inside story of being the odd sister out...

This biography of Mme de Sevigne brings to life the world of seventeenth-century France, a mother and her daughter, a writer and her brilliant letters. The passion and the pathos of this correspondence brings us as close as we can come to the mind of a woman in the court of Louis XIV.