Böcker av Mary Keating

A sextant is an astronomical instrument used for measuring angular distances of celestial bodies to determine latitude and longitude. Nantucket sits at latitude 41° 17' 0. 46" N; longitude 70° 5' 58.06" W. On Nantucket thousands of bodies are spinning in the same latitude/longitude as they prepare for the Christmas Stroll now in its fifth decade! Molly, a retired nurse, gives herself the gift of the Christmas Stroll after living alone since her husband, John, died of colon cancer. Weezie gives herself the gift of the Christmas Stroll after her best childhood friend, Maggie, dies unexpectedly. Andrea, a Quaker living on Nantucket, works at her shop Yarn Pastures. Andrea inherited the shop after the recent death of her Mother. Can grief be washed away by the tides of this beautiful island? What blessings or heartaches does the island of Nantucket hold for Andrea, Weezie, and Molly? Nantucket whalers used their sextants to navigate their way home under the stars. Andrea, Weezie and Molly find themselves without a sextant to guide them. Under the celestial skies of December they must see into their own hearts from every angle until the Christmas Stroll ends and maybe hope and Nantucket remain.

Set in the 1950s in the hills of Bradford, Pennsylvania, It's A Girl! weaves together the delights and heartaches a girl faces in the family and the town where she grew up. Reading It's A Girl! will take you back to lingering, tender-hearted memories that everyone knows in childhood. But in Bradford, Pennsylvania, the stories seem to never fade. Is it because Bradford was such a rich town? Oil was discovered in the 1870s but oil derricks were still in back yards in the 1950s. The rich oil producers seemed to give the town a glow and in this glow the trees seemed to be greener and the sky a brighter blue. The ever-present derricks and oil men almost altered a child's understanding of the world.

It's summer at the famous Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. Chautauqua is about to open its Main Gate to 100,000 visitors who enjoy plays, operas, lectures, symphonies and the "Chautauqua Experience."This real-life setting on Chautauqua Lake welcomes Maggie Michaels Wood, a third-generation Chautauquan, in what the Chinese call one's most important year: sixty. There is Paul Rains, a handsome singer performing in South Pacific at the famous Amphitheater. There is the concert itself, performed by singers of diversity within the Zeitgeist of America. Maggie and Paul: two different backgrounds, two different lives attracted to each other after hours at the Backstage Cafe.Chautauqua After Hours weaves a spellbinding story into a vibrant mosaic of a time, a place, and a summer giving birth to moments of love and sadness that will endure forever.