The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch

In this daring novel, Yuknavitch takes a provocative look at the intimate relationship among love, art, and sex in a group of emotionally scarred artists who want to save one of their own. The Small Backs of Children is written in the voices of characters without first names—photographer, writer, poet, performance artist, playwright, filmmaker, and painter—the novel begins in modern Eastern Europe (likely Lithuania), occupied by an unseen force, where a photojournalist captures an award-winning shot: a young girl running from her exploding home, in which the rest of her family dies. The girl escapes into the woods, making her way to a widow's home; the widow teaches her about art, and the girl begins to paint. Meanwhile, an American writer who is friends with the photographer, is hospitalized with severe depression. The writer's best friend, a poet, believes she can help the writer; she enters the war zone to bring the orphaned girl to the United States. Yuknavitch's novel is disturbing and challenging, but undoubtedly leaves its mark. (Publisher Weekly Reviews)

Need Another Beach Read?

Looking for another beach read? Stop by our display on the lower level of the library for some quick picks including:

Summer Sisters by Judy Blume: Two women from very different families become inseparable companions during summers on Martha's Vineyard during their coming-of-age years, forging the bonds of a lifelong friendship that weathers growing up, marriage, children, careers, and betrayal.

Something Borrowed by Emily Griffen: Rachel has always been the consummate good girl---until her thirtieth birthday, when, after too many drinks, she ends up in bed with her best friend's fiancé. Although determined to put the one-night fling behind her, Rachel realizes she has genuine feelings for the one guy she should run from. As the wedding nears, Rachel knows she has to make a choice. In doing so, she discovers that the lines between right and wrong can be blurry, endings aren't always neat, and sometimes you have to risk all to win true happiness.

Ruby by Anne Hood: Following the tragic death of her husband, Olivia, a grieving New York City milliner, desperately struggles to rebuild her life, until she meets Ruby, a young, pregnant delinquent abandoned by her family, who takes up residence in Olivia's Rhode Island beach house. An unlikely friendship is forged as Olivia nurtures Ruby and her unborn child and experiences the daily challenges presented by a wayward teen, who may or may not teach Olivia how to live again.

A Life Gone Awry

Inspired by a personal loss, author Thomas Christopher Greene explores the way that tragedy and time assail one man’s memories of his life and loves in his latest book The Headmaster's Wife. 

Like his father before him, Arthur Winthrop is the Headmaster of Vermont’s elite Lancaster School. It is the place he feels has given him his life, but is also the site of his undoing as events spiral out of his control. Found wandering naked in Central Park, he begins to tell his story to the police, but his memories collide into one another, and the true nature of things, a narrative of love, of marriage, of family and of a tragedy Arthur does not know how to address emerges. Luminous and atmospheric, bringing to life the tight-knit enclave of a quintessential New England boarding school, the novel is part mystery, part love story and an exploration of the ties of place and family.

"Greene’s genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov’s classic, Lolita, and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn’s contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012)." --Booklist