The Drowning Season

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.
Angel Landing

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.
White Horses

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.
Fortune’s Daughter

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.
Read MoreIllumination Night

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.
At Risk

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.
Read MoreFaithful: A Novel

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.
Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.
What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.
Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.
Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel.
Find the Reading Group Guide here
Read MoreTurtle Moon

A New York Times and National Bestseller
Turtle Moon transports the reader to Verity, Florida, a place where anything can happen during the month of May, when migrating sea turtles come to town, mistaking the glow of the streetlights for the moon. Lucy Rosen, a transplanted New Yorker, is determined to start a new life in Verity, along with her twelve-year-old son, Keith. But neither Lucy nor Keith could begin to imagine what the town holds in store for them. Everything they’ve ever hope for, everything they’ve ever feared, begins to happen. When Julian Cash, Verity-born and fierce enough to paralyze bees with fright, enters their lives, nothing will be the same – for Lucy, and her son, or for Julian.
Sensual, suspenseful, dangerous and magical, Turtle Moon is Alice Hoffman’s most beloved book.
Read MoreSecond Nature

A New York Times and National Bestseller
In this latter-day Beauty and the Beast a suburban woman discovers her own wild spirit because of a chance encounter.
Robin Moore, coping with a divorce and a troubled teen-aged son, impulsively rescues a stranger from a psychiatric ward – a beautiful, uncivilized innocent who has been raised in the wilderness and possesses no more sophistication than a child. But when she brings him home to her perfectly ordered neighborhood, the events that follow cause Robin to question her wisdom and doubt her own heart – and, ultimately, to change all of her ideas about love and humanity. A novel of suspense and enchantment that is a true page-turner.
Read MorePractical Magic

A New York Times and National Bestseller
A Warner major motion picture
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that went wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally endured that fate: As children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their darkened house and their love concoctions and their crowd of black cats. All Gillian and Sally wanted to do was escape. One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they shared brought them back to each other, and to the magic they couldn’t escape. A delicious novel about witches and real love, family life and everyday spells. A literary incantation.
Read More