Graham Joyce
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The Facts of Life: A Novel
Graham Joyce
Set during and immediately after World War II, The Facts of Life follows the fortunes of Frank Arthur Vine, the result of a tryst between his mother Cassie and an American GI. Because Cassie is too unreliable and unstable to act as his proper guardian, Frank is brought up alternately by his mother’s six very different sisters—each singularly idiosyncratic—and by his beguiling and charismatic grandmother.
But, as his mother knows, and his grandmother strongly suspects, Frank is no ordinary child.
The Facts of Life takes place in Coventry, in the English Midlands, the notorious target of Hitler’s fiercest bombing raid and, some nine centuries earlier, the scene of the infamous Lady Godiva’s naked ride through the marketplace. Peopled with entrancing characters, it is an enormously affecting tale of family and sisterhood, of the kindness and the madness of women, of the fantastic breaking through in a troubled world.
The Limits of Enchantment: A Novel
Graham Joyce
Everything Fern Cullen knows she’s learned from her Mammy—and none of it’s conventional. Taught midwifery at an early age, Fern grows up as Mammy’s trusted assistant in a small English village and learns through experience that secrets are precious, men can’t be trusted, hippies are filthy and people should generally mind their own business.
But when one of Mammy’s patients allegedly dies from a potion prescribed to induce abortion, the town’s people rally against her outdated methods, and Mammy ends up hospitalized, due to a bad fall and a broken heart. Now the county is threatening eviction if Fern can’t come up with the overdue rent, and a bunch of hippies and a woman with hoop earrings with a mysterious connection to Mammy seem to be the only people with any answers. As Fern struggles to save her home and Mammy’s good name, everything around her begins to transform, and she soon uncovers a legacy spotted with magic.
The Limits of Enchantment is at once a story of two women: one with a deep past and one who finds her history in the other. It is a tale of midwifery,…
Graham Joyce
Sam and his friends are like any gang of normal young boys. Roaming wild around the outskirts of their car-factory town. Daring adults to challenge their freedom. Until the day Sam wakes to find the Tooth Fairy sitting on the edge of his bed. Not the benign figure of childhood myth, but an enigmatic presence that both torments and seduces him, changing his life forever. Is she real or just a figment of his turbulent imagination? All Sam knows, as he painfully grows from childhood to adolescence, is that she is never very far away…
Graham Joyce
After the sudden death of his wife, Tom Webster travels to Jerusalem in search of a friend from his college days. The haunted city, divided by warring religious factions, offers him no refuge from his guilt and grief. As he is wandering through the streets and the archaeological sites, a mysterious old woman appears to Tom and delivers messages that seem beyond his comprehension. But a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been kept hidden by an old Jewish innkeeper appears to offer the key to understanding the apparition. Driven to the edge of insanity, Tom believes the spirit of Mary Magdalene is trying to reveal the hidden history of the Resurrection, and he struggles to reconcile the distant past with his own future before the threads of his identity unravel.
