The Collected Novels Volume One (ePub)

Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies, and Chamber Music, has been literary editor of the New Republic, a nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.

Praise for Chamber Music
“I believe Chamber Music will be a classic. It deserves to be.” —Alice Walker
 
“Doris Grumbach’s Chamber Music has made a considerable impression on me. . . . It is a haunting story, all the more powerful because of the elegant economy of the writing.” —Barbara Pym
 
“It is as if Willa Cather had decided to tell the whole truth. It is Virginia Woolf without the evasive prettifying. . . . One of those rare novels written for adults who listen.” —The New York Times
 
“What a strange, haunting, stately book it is, and literally unputdownable, because Grumbach so gently tugs a reader through it with persuasions and limited promises and mysteries.” —Penelope Mortimer
 
Praise for The Ladies
“Boldly imagined, subtly crafted . . . eloquently documents the existence of women who lived as they wished to, instead of as society expected them to.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Grumbach is acutely sensitive to the quiet hum of everyday living and the small acquired habits that bond lovers over long periods. It is especially touching to watch the women age as the pages turn, affecting a kind of time-lapse realism that doesn’t diminish the Ladies’ passion or love for each other.” —Ms.
 
“A tale told in delicate brushstrokes of a relationship in which two hearts came almost literally to beat as one.” —Newsday
 
“Understated and elegant, this slim book is a true classic on that rarest of relationships, companions of the heart.”—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle