Beth Gutcheon Books In Order

The New Girls

The New Girls is a resonant, engrossing novel about five girls during their formative prep school years in the tumultuous mid sixties. Into their reality of first class trips to Europe, resort vacations, and deb parties enter the Vietnam War, the women’s movement, and the sexual revolution. As the old traditions collide with the new society, the girls lose their innocence, develop a social conscience, and discover their sexuality blossoming into women shaped by their turbulent times.

Still Missing/Without a Trace

Alex Selky, going on seven, kissed his mother goodbye and set off for school, a mere two blocks away. He never made it. Desperate to find him, his mother begins a vigil that lasts for days, then weeks, then months. She is treated first as a tragic figure, then as a grief crazed hysteric, then as anreminder of the bad fortune that can befall us all. Against all hope, despite false leads and thedesertions of her friends and allies she believes with all her heart that somehow, somewhere, Alex will be found alive. Beth Gutcheon builds a heartrending suspense that culminates in a climax you will never forget.

Domestic Pleasures

After her ex husband dies in a plane crash, Martha Gaver is horrified to learn that the executor of Raymond’s estate is Charlie, the conservative, insufferable lawyer who represented Raymond in their bitter divorce. Yet soon after they reenter each other’s lives, Martha, Charlie, and their teenage children find they have more in common than they imagined as they struggle to rebuild their lives…
and that opposites really do attract. Engaging,, witty, and entertaining, Domestic Pleasures is a touching, piercing tale of love lost, found, and embraced once again.

Saying Grace

Rue Shaw has everything a much loved child, a solid marriage, and a job she loves. Saying Grace takes place in Rue’s mid life, when her daughter is leaving home, her parents are failing, her husband is restless and the school she has built is being buffeted by changes in society that affect us all. Funny, rich in detail and finally stunning, this novel presents a portrait of a tight knit community in jeopardy, and of a charming woman whose most human failing is that she wants things to stay the same. Saying Grace is about the fragility of human happiness and the strength of convictions, about keeping faith as a couple whether it keeps one safe or not. Beth Gutcheon has a gift for creating a world in microcosm and capturing the grace in the rhythms of everyday life.

Five Fortunes

Witty, wise, and hope filled, Five Fortunes is a large hearted tale of five vivid and unforgettable women who know where they’ve been but have no idea where they’re going. A lively octogenarian, a private investigator, a mother and daughter with an unresolved past, and a recently widowed politician’s wife share little else except a thirst for new dreams, but after a week at the luxurious health spa known as ‘Fat Chance’ their lives will be intertwined in ways they couldn’t have imagined. At a place where doctors, lawyers, spoiled housewives, movie stars, and captains of industry are stripped of the social markers that keep them from really seeing one another, unexpected friendships emerge, reminding us of the close links between the rich and the poor, fortune and misfortune, and the magic of chance.

More Than You Know

In a small town called Dundee on the coast of Maine, an old woman named Hannah Gray begins her story: ‘Somebody said ‘true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.’ I’ve seen both and I don’t know how to tell you which is worse.’ Hannah has decided, finally, to leave a record of the passionate and anguished long ago summer in Dundee when she met Conary Crocker, the town bad boy and love of her life. This spare, piercing, and unforgettable novel bridges two centuries and two intense love stories as Hannah and Conary’s fate is interwoven with the tale of a marriage that took place in Dundee a hundred years earlier.

Leeway Cottage

In April 1940, as the Na*zis march into Denmark, Sydney Brant, a wealthy girl of the Dundee summer colony, marries a gifted Danish pianist, Laurus Moss. They believe they are well matched, as young lovers do, but Laurus’s beloved family is in Copenhagen, hostage to what the fortunes of Hitler’s war will bring. By the time the war is over, Laurus’s family has played an active role in Denmark’s grassroots rescue of virtually all seven thousand of the country’s Jews. Meanwhile, in America, Sydney has led a group knitting for the war effort, and had a baby.

Combining the story of one long American twentieth century marriage with one of the most stirring stories of World War II, Leeway Cottage is a beautifully written tour de force of a novel.

Good-bye and Amen

In a summer cottage on the coast of Maine, an unlikely love was nurtured, a marriage endured, and a family survived. Now it is time for the children of that marriage to make peace with the wounds and the treasures left to them. And to sort out which is which.

Beth Gutcheon’s critically acclaimed family saga, Leeway Cottage, was a major achievement: a vivid and moving tale of war and marriage and their consequences that enchanted readers. Good bye and Amen is the next chapter for the family of Leeway Cottage, the story of what happens when those most powerful people in any family drama, the parents, have left the stage.

The complicated marriage of the gifted Danish pianist Laurus Moss to the provincial American child of privilege Sydney Brant was a mystery to many who knew them, including their three children. Now, Eleanor, Monica, and Jimmy Moss have to decide how to divide or share what Laurus and Sydney have left them without losing one another.

Secure and cheerful Eleanor, the oldest, wants little for herself but much for her children. Monica, the least loved middle child, brings her youthful scars to the table, as well as the baggage of a difficult marriage to the charismatic Norman, who left a brilliant legal career, though not his ambition, to become an Episcopal priest. Youngest and best loved Jimmy, who made a train wreck of his young adulthood, has returned after a long period of alienation from the family surprisingly intact, but extremely hard for his sisters to read.

Having lived through childhoods both materially blessed and emotionally difficult, with a father who could seem uninvolved and a mother who loved a good family game of & 147;let’s you and him fight,& 148; the Mosses have formed strong adult bonds that none of them wants to damage. But it’s difficult to divide a beloved summer house three ways and keep it too. They all know what’s at stake in a world of atomized families, a house like Leeway Cottage can be the glue that keeps generations of cousins and grandchildren deeply connected to one another. But knowing it’s important doesn’t make it easy.

Gossip

A gifted storyteller…
her characters are intelligent, brave, and witty…
human and real. Susan Isaacs, New York Times Book Review The critically acclaimed author of Good bye and Amen, Leeway Cottage, and More Than You Know, Beth Gutcheon returns with Gossip, a sharply perceptive and emotionally resonant novel about the power of knowing things about others, the consequences of rumor, and the unexpected price of friendship. A story set among the rich, famous, and well dressed of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Gossip is a bravura display of this exceptional author s breathtaking talents, addressing important themes of motherhood, friendship, and fidelity. Every reader who admires the strong, character driven women s fiction of Sue Miller, Alice Hoffman, Elizabeth Berg, and Kaye Gibbons should lend an ear to Beth Gutcheon s Gossip.