Ella in Bloom

Living in the shadow of her "perfect" older sister and her mother's continuous disapproval, Ella rediscovers her own value, charm, and significant role in life when she is renunited with the man who had once been an object of rivalry between her sister and herself. By the author of Footprints. Reprint.

Literature & Fiction

HEARON, Shelby

Contemporary

Penguin??Books

Ella In Bloom 6-Copy Counter Display

When her husband dumps her for an old girlfriend and sets all of Peachland, South Carolina, gossiping, Janey Daniels has to get away—far away—for a "sabbatical" year. She flees to Burlington, Vermont, home of Aunt May, her mother's only living relative. There she adopts Beulah, a Labrador puppy in training to become a companion dog for the blind. Not for a moment does Janey suspect that this "year of the dog" will change her life forever.
Shelby Hearon is an acknowledged master at illuminating the nuances of relationships. In Year of the Dog, she explores the surprising ways that the heart heals after a betrayal. While Janey is training Beulah, Beulah leads Janey to a new love, James Maarten, a smart, "fidgety" teacher they meet at the dog park. As Janey soon discovers, James has suffered a betrayal of his own that makes it hard for him to open up and trust her with even the smallest details of his past. While Janey tries to help James, she also reaches out to her enigmatic Aunt May, a retired librarian reputed to be the friend, perhaps even the lover, of popular mystery writer Bert Greenwood. When Janey attempts to solve the twin mysteries of why her great aunt has distanced herself from the family—and what her true relationship is with Bert Greenwood—Beulah provides the clues that lead Janey to uncover the secrets of her aunt's life. By the time Beulah's stay with Janey comes to an end, the people whose lives she's linked will discover that healing and reconciliation can come in the most unexpected ways.

Year of the Dog: A Novel (James A. Michener Fiction Series)

University of Texas Press

Shelby Hearon has been widely praised for the insight, wit, and subtlety with which her novels limn the complexities of marriage and family ("What Jane Austen is to courtship, Shelby Hearon is to marriage" --New York Newsday), and the ways in which place can profoundly affect us all. Now, with Ella in Bloom, Hearon gives us her sharpest, funniest, most telling novel yet. It is the story of Ella, who has always lived in the shadow of her "perfect" older sister. A gutsy single parent eking out a living for herself and her intrepid teenage daughter Birdie, Ella invents a genteel life, writing to her mother in drought-baked Texas about her heirloom roses, her linen dresses, and other amenities of a respectable life in Old Metairie, Louisiana. Little does her mother know about the run-down, scruffy house Ella really lives in, or that she makes ends meet by watering rich people's houseplants when they flee the coastal summer heat. But when Ella's beautiful sister Terrell, on the way to meet her lover, is suddenly killed in a chartered plane crash, old family patterns are shattered. And Ella, confronting the reality of her life (and of the man she had relegated to the past) comes, finally and fully, into bloom. Wise, wicked, and moving, in Shelby Hearon's hands this portrait of a woman--a woman we all know--is guaranteed to give extraordinary pleasure.

Alfred.A. Knopf

From the dust jacket: "Shelby Hearon explores ... the richness and complexity of a relationship which both separates and binds a mother and a daughter."

Hannah's House

DOUBLEDAY

Hearon, Shelby, Prince Of A Fellow, A

A prince of a fellow

The Texas Congresswoman describes her childhood in Houston, her years in segregated schools, her entry into the white world while attending Boston University Law School, and her breakthrough into politics

Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait

Biographies & Memoirs

Jordan, Barbara

Community & Culture

The Second Dune, Shelby Hearon’s second novel, was published in 1973 and won the Texas Institute of Letters Award as the best book of fiction of the year. Written when Hearon was forty-three and just before her divorce, the novel is seen from the point of view of suburban housewives and their mothers and daughters.Ellen Marshall, divorced and remarried, is troubled by her son’s refusal to accept her second husband, but takes great comfort from the five-year-old daughter of her second marriage. She hopes to be able to pass on to her daughter some of the knowledge that only women possess and to help little Ellen see that women need to break the bonds that society has forced upon them. As the narrator says early in the novel, Raised by women, schooled by women, we who are mothers now were taught to look across the gulf to men and count ourselves as they counted us.” Ellen hopes her daughter will be different just as she is slowly becoming different herself.

The Second Dune

Knopf: distributed by Random House

Jolene wonders whether she belongs to either parent--who kidnapped her on a regular basis--or her bickering aunt and uncle, or the artist who makes her famous, in a humorous tale about belonging

Owning Jolene

Literary

KNOPF

Cile Tait, a thirty-two-year-old woman from Waco, Texas, tries to remake her life after a break-up with her Presbyterian preacher-husband and find love with her long-lost high school sweetheart

Hug Dancing

United States

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Books by HEARON, Shelby

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HEARON, Shelby. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ella in Bloom

Ella In Bloom 6-Copy Counter Display

Year of the Dog: A Novel (James A. Michener Fiction Series)

Ella in Bloom

Hannah's House

A prince of a fellow

Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait

The Second Dune

Owning Jolene

Hug Dancing