Wellfleet Public Library

Daughters - A Novel

From award-winning author Corinne Demas comes a moving story about the sometimes volatile but ultimately unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.

When Meredith flies home to New England, daughter Eloise in tow, she leaves her husband and a life back in LA. A heartbreaking loss is killing their marriage. So she looks to her mother and siblings for the support she desperately needs, and the love her daughter surely deserves-two things her husband can't provide. Meredith's mother, Delia, is thrilled by their sudden arrival at the family farm. But her husband braces for the chaos his stepdaughter granddaughter will surely bring.

Meredith's announcement that she's moved home for good takes the whole family by surprise and turns everything upside down. While wrestling with her future, artist Meredith is forced to confront her past-and the disappointment she believes her mother, a violin teacher, felt when musically gifted Meredith abandoned the violin. As Meredith works to repair relationships with members of her family, an old flame turns up and further complicates her life. Delia, in a desperate attempt to rescue her daughter's marriage, does something unforgivable, and Meredith has to decide if she should uproot Eloise and take off. When Eloise goes missing, help arrives from an unexpected quarter.

Corinne Demas is the award-winning author of thirty-eight books, including six novels, two short story collections, a memoir, a poetry chapbook, a play, and numerous books for children. She is the editor of Great American Short Stories: From Hawthorne to Hemingway. Demas is a professor emerita of English at Mount Holyoke College and a fiction editor for The Massachusetts Review. She divides her time between western Massachusetts and Cape Cod.