Anne Roiphe Books In Order

Novels

  1. Up the Sandbox! (1970)
  2. Long Division (1972)
  3. Torch Song (1976)
  4. Loving Kindness (1987)
  5. The Pursuit of Happiness (1991)
  6. If You Knew Me (1993)
  7. Secrets of the City (2003)
  8. An Imperfect Lens (2006)
  9. Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (2015)

Non fiction

  1. Generation Without Memory (1981)
  2. Your Child’s Mind (1985)
  3. A Season for Healing (1988)
  4. 1185 Park Avenue (1996)
  5. Fruitful (1996)
  6. A Mother’s Eye (1997)
  7. For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor (2000)
  8. Married (2002)
  9. Water from the Well (2006)
  10. Epilogue (2008)
  11. Art and Madness (2011)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Anne Roiphe Books Overview

Loving Kindness

From the acclaimed author of ‘Fruitful’ comes a novel of the love between a mother and daughter. Annie Johnson has worked hard to raise her daughter, Andrea. She is shocked, therefore, when 22 year old Andrea calls from Israel and announces that she has joined an extreme right wing Orthodox Jewish group and will be seeking an arranged marriage.

If You Knew Me

Headed into midlife, biologist Leah takes leave from her job to spend the winter at her beach house. She meets Ollie, a high school teacher, and they fall in love. To make a commitment, each must compromise, reveal secrets, and face a personal crisis that will redeem or destroy their love.

Secrets of the City

From the pages of The Forward comes celebrated author Anne Roiphe’s episodic and brilliant novel of a big city mayor and the struggles that shape the fortunes of his city, the life of his family, and the condition of his soul. Mel Rosenberg is the mayor of a city uncannily similar to New York, which is being terrorized by a string of unusual attacks. Hundreds of ducks are found dead in the park; animals mysteriously die at the zoo; dozens of people are killed by poisoned food; all of the elevator operators in one building are murdered; and the mayor is kidnapped. In addition to handling the city s multiple crises, Mel must also contend with the pressures of his imperfect family a daughter in law who is a compulsive shoplifter; an ungrateful son obsessed with status; an insecure daughter with a troubled marriage not to mention a sexy, aggressive newspaper reporter who aims desperately to be his mistress. On top of it all, he becomes entangled in a high profile political scandal that could ambush his aspirations of being elected the first Jewish president of the United States. With Secrets of the City, Anne Roiphe has delivered a fast paced, engaging story written with humor, shrewd insight, and tenderness. Her characters explore issues that are as contemporary as they are timeless, and the plot has as many unexpected twists and turns as the West Village streets. This is an insider s peek at life in the fast lane in the most brilliant and brutal city in the world, with all its secrets laid bare.

An Imperfect Lens

Acclaimed author Anne Roiphe evokes the sights and sounds of 1880s Alexandria, Egypt, a bustling center of trade and travel. From teeming docks to overflowing market stalls, from grand homes to grimy narrow alleyways, cholera microbes rise and bob in streams of water and tiny droplets, clinging to moisture as man clings to air. With a keen mind and dedication to his work, young Louis Thuillier has impressed his mentor famed scientist Louis Pasteur enough to be sent to Alexandria as one third of the French mission searching for the source of the cholera that is terrorizing the city. Along with the other members of the French mission scientists Emile Roux and Edmond Nocard and their enterprising servant Marcus Louis longs to find the cure, bringing glory to himself and to France. Este Malina is the lovely daughter of a respected Jewish doctor, whose family has lived in Alexandria for hundreds of years. A life of comfort has made Este a romantic, and she hopes to marry a man with the heart of a poet. Neither expects to find a soul mate in the other, but when Este begins to assist at the French mission’s lab, a deep bond forms. Este, though, is engaged to another, and Louis is not Jewish her family would never allow them to marry. In spite of their many differences, the lovers desire grows and their fantasies threaten to distract them from their work. In Alexandria, the disease rages on, as mysterious as it was a thousand years before. Political intrigue threatens to separate Este and Louis permanently. Their love, as fragile as the glass slides they use in the lab, is in danger before it has had a chance to thrive. With An Imperfect Lens, rich with the sights and scents of a different era, Anne Roiphe once again demonstrates the storytelling power for which she has long been hailed. From the Hardcover edition.

1185 Park Avenue

From National Book Award nominee Anne Roiphe comes this moving memoir of growing up in a wealthy Jewish home with a family who had money, status, culture everything but happiness.

While the nation was at war abroad, Roiphe, who was coming of age in 1940s New York City, saw her parents at war in their living room. Roiphe’s evocative writing puts readers right in Apartment 8C, where a constant tension plays out between a disappointed and ineffectual mother, a philandering father who uses his wife’s money to entertain other women, and a difficult brother. Behind the leisure culture of wealthy Jewish society the mahjongg games, the cocktail parties, the summer houses lurks a brutality that strikes a chord with a daughter who longs to heal the wounds of her troubled family.

Writing with a novelist’s sensibility, Roiphe reveals the poignant story of a family that has finally claimed its material wealth in a prosperous America but has yet to claim its spiritual due.

Fruitful

The author of the best selling novel Up the Sandbox offers a critical account of the feminist stance on marriage and motherhood, arguing for renewed support for the needs of working women trying to bring up children.Tour.

Married

Since she first gave voice to the struggles of a generation of women with ‘Up the Sandbox’, Anne Roiphe has been a unique chronicler of how we live in relationships and in families. In this text, Roiphe offers a defence of Married life from the perspective of a wife and mother who survived the 1950s, the sexual revolution and the women’s movement. Drawing upon a range of examples from history, literature and popular culture ranging from Jane Austen’s Emma to Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as her own two marriages, Roiphe looks at the state of wedded union from an emotional as well as a social perspective.

Water from the Well

Water from the Well is a journey four thousand years back to the time of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. The graceful prose of renowned author Anne Roiphe brilliantly captures these biblical women and makes their fascinating stories come alive.

As each story unfolds, we find that the matriarchs had to overcome the same devastating obstacles women face today infertility, lust, abandonment, and uncertainty yet they managed to cope with betrayal, death, sacrifice, and jealousy while dealing with the emerging reality of a new faith. This remarkable volume demonstrates how their lives helped to lay the foundation of womanhood in the Western world. Combining the deep insight of Bruce Feiler with the narrative skill of Antonia Fraser, Anne Roiphe delivers a fascinating work that deftly brings these four biblical matriarchs into our own age.

Epilogue

Widowed novelist, near seventy, ex Park Avenue girl, ex beatnik, ex many other things too complicated to list here, loves big parties, summers at the beach, grandchildren, seeks interesting man for dinner and a movie. Anne Roiphe was not quite seventy years old when her husband of nearly forty years unexpectedly passed away. But it was not until her daughters placed a personal ad in a literary journal that Roiphe began to consider the previously unimagined possibility of a new man. Moving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of a new day to day routine, Epilogue takes us on her journey into the unknown world of life after love. Roiphe decides to reenter the dating world. But between new lunches, coffee dates, and e mail exchanges, she wrestles with an unsettling loneliness. Recollections of marriage evoke complex, unexpected emotions on her journey through grief toward new companionship. In beautifully wrought vignettes, she recalls hailing a cab for the first time and learning to lock and unlock the front door tasks her husband had always done. Eloquent and astute, Epilogue tells the story of love rekindled and life remade. Roiphe offers us an elegant literary pastiche not of grief, but of hope and renewal.

Art and Madness

Luminous and intensely personal, Art and Madness recounts the lost years of Anne Roiphe’s twenties, when the soon to be critically acclaimed author put her dreams of becoming a writer on hold to devote herself to the magnetic but coercive male artists of the period. Coming of age in the 1950s, Roiphe, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, grew up on Park Avenue and had an adolescence defined by privilege, petticoats, and social rules. At Smith College her classmates wore fraternity pins on their cashmere sweaters and knit argyle socks for their boyfriends during lectures. Young women were expected to give up personal freedom for devotion to home and children. Instead, Roiphe chose Beckett, Proust, Sartre, and Mann as her heroes and sought out the chaos of New York s White Horse Tavern and West End Bar. She was unmoored and uncertain, waiting for a wisp of truth, a feather s brush of beauty, a moment of insight. Salvation came in the form of a brilliant playwright whom she married and worked to support, even after he left her alone on their honeymoon and later pawned her family silver, china, and pearls. Her near religious belief in the power of art induced her to overlook his infidelity and alcoholism, and to dutifully type his manuscripts in place of writing her own. During an era that idolized its male writers, she became, sometimes with her young child in tow, one of the girls draped across the sofa at parties with George Plimpton, Terry Southern, Doc Humes, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, and William Styron. In the Hamptons she socialized with Larry Rivers, Jack Gelber and other painters and sculptors. Moderation for most of us is a most unnatural condition…
. I preferred to burn out like a brilliant firecracker. But while she was playing the muse reality beckoned, forcing her to confront the notion that any sacrifice was worth making for art. Art and Madness recounts the fascinating evolution of a time when art and alcohol and rebellion caused collateral damage and sometimes produced extraordinary work. In clear sighted, perceptive, and unabashed prose, Roiphe shares with astonishing honesty the tumultuous adventure of self discovery that finally led to her redemption.

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