In the summer of 1952, Bea Nightingale, a divorced middle-aged high school English teacher in New York, has been dispatched by her bullying brother, Marvin, a successful businessman, to Paris to bring home his wayward son, Julian, who turns out to be an ambitionless waiter now married to an older Jewish woman, Lili, who lost her husband and young son in the war. Ozick deftly delineates these fragile lives as they chase their own interpretations of...

"From one of our most pre eminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past , and how our experience colors those meanings. Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven surviving trustees of the now defunct (for 34 years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with a description of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall , between the subtle anti-semitism that pervaded...

Chronicles five episodes in the rising and falling fortunes of fictional character Ruth Puttermesser, a lawyer whose ethics and cynicism cannot quite squelch her romantic, idealist nature.

A portrait of one day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, a man on the brink of despair. A novel about one day in the life of a middle-aged New Yorker struggling to make sense of his failures, atone for his sins, and understand how to truly "live in the moment."