GOOD DAUGHTERS - Couverture souple

“Maynard’s spare prose packs a rich emotional punch...a can’t put-it-down mystery.” (People on THE GOOD DAUGHTERS)

“[Maynard] weav(es) a knotty tale of family secrets, told in the alternating voices of her likable main characters.” (Entertainment Weekly on THE GOOD DAUGHTERS)

“I am hard pressed to think of anything I’ve read that more honestly and eloquently expresses both the perils and the pleasures of love. Joyce Maynard has outdone herself in this beautifully written story you’ll find hard to put down, and impossible to forget.” (Elizabeth Berg, author of The Last Time I Saw You )

“ THE GOOD DAUGHTERS, weaves a story of choices and events so intimate I felt I was part of it. The novel is wrenching, the emotions radiant, and will leave readers transformed.” (Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author of The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners)

“Joyce Maynard is in top-notch form with Labor Day. From the perfect pitch of a teenaged boy narrator to the eloquent message of how loneliness can bind people together, this is simply a novel you cannot miss.” (Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper and Handle With Care)

“Labor Day is suffused with tenderness, dreaminess and love . . . first and foremost a page-turner . . . [it] puts back together the world that it destroys . . . .you definitely need to get a box of tissues.” (Newsday)

“[The] story is moving and fast-moving, affirming Maynard’s reputation as a master storyteller and showing her to be a passionate humanist with a gifted ear and heart. . . . Maynard illuminates the human experience.” (People (Four Stars))

“Riveting and disturbing.” (Katha Pollitt, New York Times Book Review on At Home in the World)

“But apart from being a successful thriller, this book is a fascinating portrait of what causes a family to founder, and how much it can cost to put it back on the right path. ” (NPR.org)

“Beautifully written.” (New Orleans Times-Picayune)

They were born on the same day, in the same small New Hampshire hospital—but Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson are different in nearly every way.

Ruth is an artist, a romantic with a rich, passionate, imaginative life—the fifth daughter born to a gentle, caring farmer and his stolid wife. Raised by a pair of capricious drifters, Dana is a scientist and realist whose faith is firmly planted in the natural world. From the 1950s to the present, the lives of the “birthday sisters” parallel and oddly intersect, as each struggles to find her place in a world in which she has never truly felt she belonged. Sharing little except a birth date—and a love for Dana’s wild and beautiful older brother, Ray—two virtual strangers will travel alternate paths winding through first love, first sex, marriage, parenthood, divorce, and tragic loss...until both are forced to reevaluate themselves and each other when past secrets and forgotten memories unexpectedly come to light.