Böcker av Jessica Stilling

Who was my mother? This is a question that plagues Anna, a journalist living in New York City, after the sudden tragic death of her parents. Armed with a box of letters and a strange painting, Anna travels to Paris to learn more about the life that her mother, Bethany, lived in the city of lights in the late 1960s. There she meets Stefan, her mother's former lover whom she never knew existed. Bethany's one year in Paris included May 1968, a turbulent time when student protests and labor strikes threatened to upend the very fabric of French society. Bethany, a blue-blood Bostonian, found herself in the thick of riots and rationing as she and her friends attempted to find their place in the world. At the heart of it all is the story of Bethany and her lover, Stefan, a quiet, unassuming man with a harrowing past and many dark secrets of his own.

Who is Lydia Warren? That's what she'd like to know. An amnesiac, she vaguely remembers arriving in Santorini with this one-armed man she instinctive trusts but cannot recall his name. She guides us through the fog that is her mind, and her odyssey towards understanding that is even further complicated by memories of a life not her own from before she was born."Brimming with suspense and carefully controlled darkness, the sounds and smells of Greece waft from every page as Stilling moves back and forth from Lydia's past life to her present with a dexterity and skill commensurate with Audrey Niffenegger." - Damian McNicholl, author of A Son Called Gabriel and The Moment of Truth

Lorelei Bauer is a modern day woman with a penchant for Sylvia Plath, a woman struggling with the injustices of the fifties with her marriage, her role and status as a poet, her "job" as a mother, and her mental illness.Lorelei's own mother suffered from mental illness and when Lorelei learns of her mother's breakdown and illegal abortion, she goes on a quest to better understand her as a parent. Lorelei soon discovers her life is paralleling Plath's and she panics about her fate.During her quest, she meets up with an old friend of her mother's, Joanne, who gives her a secret, unpublished manuscript that her college friend, Sylvia Plath, sent her before her death. It is a continuation of the story of Esther Greenwood, Plath's protagonist from The Bell Jar. Lorelei learns many secrets from the Plath manuscript which both hurt her and makes her hopeful for her own future.