Twenty years ago Maura Lenihan was the curvaceous red-haired teenager at the center of a political sex scandal. Today, Maura is a thirty-five year old hospice nurse who spends her days caring for the cancer-ridden and comatose and her nights reading romance novels in a drab apartment with only a dying ficus for company. Her life is boring and safe and just the way she likes it. However, Maura’s safe cocoon is now being threatened both by the press’ renewed interest in the twenty year old scandal and the attentions of her most recent patient -- a thirty year old Wall Street investment banker whose black hair and blue eyes are oddly familiar.
Genre: FICTION / Contemporary WomenRecently release
My mother, never a large woman, weighed no more than a ten year old child. I favored my father’s side, the Lenihans. “A real farmer’s daughter,” my mother would say every year as the pediatrician marked the shameful statistics in my chart: eightieth percentile for both weight and height. Cheeks burning, I would close my eyes and imagine myself at my grandfather’s farm in Ireland, surrounded by my Lenihan cousins whose long limbs and bright red hair mirrored my own. I would close my eyes and wish I was anywhere but trapped in the examination room with my mother and her perfectly coiffed blonde hair and sharp blue eyes. I’d wish I was anywhere but Cold Spring.
Now my mother was the one trapped in Cold Spring. The living room that she had so lovingly restored to all its nineteenth century glory, whose original moldings gleamed with decades of the housekeeper’s polish, her prison. The room we children had been forbidden to enter except at Christmas and Easter reeked of antiseptic, her treasures pushed aside in a jumble to make room for a steel hospital bed.
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Greek
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Already translated.
Translated by Theodora Siafiliou
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Portuguese
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Already translated.
Translated by Danielli Guirado Pereira
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Miriam de la Concepción Delgado
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