A moving epic novel about the Addis family follows the lives of a butcher, Charles, and his wife Etta, their two children, and Rose, the grandchild who must face the demands of their past.
ROSE WAS BORN TO A FAMILY OF EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN.
Her immigrant great-grandmother, the first Rose, a shrewd and beautiful fortune-teller, who gave abortions to make “a little extra"...Proud Etta, matriarch, lover of costly things, who kept a fine home with a firm hand...Delicate Helen, musical prodigy, who soared on her talent into madness.
Now Rose—American Rose—must face up to all their lives in order to claim her own.
Julia Markus, an English professor at Hofstra University, received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for her first novel, Uncle, which was followed by three well-received novels, American Rose, Friends Along the Way and A Change of Luck, as well as her critically acclaimed biographies, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Her most recent book is J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian.
"Bickering, weeping, sulking, giggling—the Addises are vibrantly alive. Their struggles both distress and amuse us; their disappointments touch us..."
—Anne Tyler, The New York Times
"Moving and masterful...a novel of tremendous power and originality by one of the most gifted novelists of her generation."
—Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides
“A story told by a writer who knows her people from the heart out...I loved it!"
—Belva Plain, author of Evergreen and Random Winds