Alice Hoffman

 
New York Times bestseller

From the beloved, bestselling author of The Dovekeepers, a mesmerizing new novel about the electric and impassioned love between two vastly different souls in New York during the volatile first decades of the twentieth century.

Coney Island: Coralie Sardie is the daughter of the sinister impresario behind The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a boardwalk freak show that thrills the masses. An exceptional swimmer, Coralie appears as the Mermaid in her father’s “museum,” alongside performers like the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl, and a one-hundred-year-old turtle. One night Coralie stumbles upon a striking young man photographing moonlit trees in the woods off the Hudson River.

The dashing photographer is Eddie Cohen, a Russian immigrant who has run away from his father’s Lower East Side Orthodox community and his job as an apprentice tailor. When Eddie photographs the devastation on the streets of New York following the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, he becomes embroiled in the suspicious mystery behind a young woman’s disappearance.

With its colorful crowds of heiresses, thugs, and idealists, New York itself becomes a riveting character as Hoffman weaves her trademark magic, romance, and masterful storytelling to unite Coralie and Eddie in a sizzling and tender story of young love in tumultuous times. The Museum of Extraordinary Things is Hoffman at her most spellbinding.

 
Set on Martha’s Vineyard, here is a stunning novel that brings that beautiful island to vivid life – a novel that weaves together the lives of a little boy who can’t grow, an elderly woman who needs to save someone before she passes on, a blond giant, a young couple, a teenaged girl looking for trouble. Lives of intense erotic longing, of quiet understanding, of willful determination. It is a novel of magic and mystery, and a literary event that confirms Alice Hoffman as one of our finest and most compelling writers.

 
This fierce and beautiful story charts the histories of two women: Rae, young and unmarried and far from home, awaits the birth of her first child. Lila, a fortune-teller with no interest in the future, has lost her own daughter more than a quarter of a century earlier in New York. When these two women meet in Southern California it’s Earthquake Weather – the time when unexpected things happen. Immediately, their lives and fortunes become intertwined, as Rae tries to break away from the man she has been with since high school and Lila reaches into the past to search for the child she lost.

This contemporary world is set against a series of Russian folktales told by an old woman who lives at the edge of Manhattan, in a place so well hidden it can only be found once in a life-time.

 
Teresa grew up with dreams of dark-eyed fearless heroes on white horses who would one day come to rescue her. The men her mother told her about were a special breed – rules didn’t apply to them or to her brother, Silver. Their intense attachment becomes the stuff of nightmares rather than fairytales. In a dangerous world, Teresa must rescue herself and rewrite her family mythology before it ruins her life.

 
Natalie is a therapist in a small Long Island town, living in her aunt Minnie’s boarding house. When a new client walks into her office she makes a classic mistake – she gets involved. He’s an intriguing man, with a tall tale to tell. Under his influence, Natalie questions her current relationship and wonders if she can make a true commitment. Within this humorous love-story of mistaken identities Alice Hoffman creates a town full of original personalities, each with his or her own agenda and fate.

 
On a secluded waterfront estate on the North Shore of Long Island, a matriarch named Esther rules over her clan. But in spite of her sharp tongue and manipulative ways, she cannot quite keep control over her family. Her son, Phillip, routinely tries to drown himself each summer; her granddaughter dreams of escape. Esther has hired Cohen, a Russian landscaper, to watch over the family as well as the grounds. But Cohen has been watching Esther – and his love for her is growing wild enough to uproot them all.

 
Alice Hoffman’s first novel, written while she was still a graduate student at Stanford University, introduced her as a major American novelist.

Here, she introduced us to the mythic society of the street life of the “Orphans” and of the girls who belong to them – “The property of the Orphans.” This is a world coated by “ice, leather, and white dust,” a place of violence, drugs, and honor. A lonely, infatuated outsider falls in love with the gang’s brooding, doomed leader, McKay. In time she discovers what can and cannot be possessed and what can happen when you hand your heart over to someone who knows nothing about love. A search for identity, a dark fairytale, “a first novel of great promise” and the beginning of a career that more than fulfilled that promise.

 
The Rules of Magic  will be turned into a TV series on HBO Max. Read more about the project on Variety. 

An instant New York Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick from beloved author Alice Hoffman—the spellbinding prequel to Practical Magic.

Find your magic.

For the Owens family, love is a curse that began in 1680, when Maria Owens was charged with witchery for loving the wrong man.

Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the sixties, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows that her three children are dangerously unique. Difficult Franny, with skin as pale as milk and blood red hair, shy and beautiful Jet, who can read other people’s thoughts, and charismatic Vincent, who began looking for trouble on the day he could walk.

From the start Susanna sets down rules for her children: No walking in the moonlight, no red shoes, no wearing black, no cats, no crows, no candles, no books about magic. And most importantly, never, ever, fall in love. But when her children visit their Aunt Isabelle, in the small Massachusetts town where the Owens family has been blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong, they uncover family secrets and begin to understand the truth of who they are. Yet, the children cannot escape love even if they try, just as they cannot escape the pains of the human heart. The two beautiful sisters will grow up to be the memorable aunts in Practical Magic, while Vincent, their beloved brother, will leave an unexpected legacy.

Alice Hoffman delivers “fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle” (The New York Times Book Review) in a story how the only remedy for being human is to be true to yourself. Thrilling and exquisite, real and fantastical, The Rules of Magic is “irresistible…the kind of book you race through, then pause at the last forty pages, savoring your final moments with the characters” (USA TODAY, 4/4 stars).

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New York Times bestseller

“A luminous, Marquez-esque tale” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from the New York Times bestselling author of The Museum of Extraordinary Things: a forbidden love story set on a tropical island about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro—the Father of Impressionism.

Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel’s mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for being a difficult girl who refuses to live by the rules. Growing up, Rachel’s salvation is their maid Adelle’s belief in her strengths, and her deep, life-long friendship with Jestine, Adelle’s daughter. But Rachel’s life is not her own. She is married off to a widower with three children to save her father’s business. When her older husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Frédérick, arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects all of her family, including her favorite son, who will become one of the greatest artists of France.

“A work of art” (Dallas Morning News), The Marriage of Opposites showcases the beloved, bestselling Alice Hoffman at the height of her considerable powers. “Her lush, seductive prose, and heart-pounding subject…make this latest skinny-dip in enchanted realism…the Platonic ideal of the beach read” (Slate.com). Once forgotten to history, the marriage of Rachel and Frédérick “will only renew your commitment to Hoffman’s astonishing storytelling” (USA TODAY).

Find the Reading Group Guide here

 
A New York Times and National Bestseller

In this groundbreaking novel Alice Hoffman creates an ordinary but unforgettable American family – Polly, a wife and mother. Ivan, her husband. Charlie, their eight-year-old, obsessed with dinosaurs. And Amanda, eleven, who dreams of becoming a gymnast. Amanda is blessed with great determination and strength, but when she is diagnosed with AIDS, she and her family must draw on every bit of courage they possess as their lives are torn apart, and as they discover how deep their love for each other really is.