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Today's Featured Title and Contest |
June 7, 2016 |
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This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we think is a great summer reading selection. Read more about it, and enter our Summer Reading Contest by Wednesday, June 8th at 11:59am ET for a chance to win one of five copies of TWAIN'S END by Lynn Cullen, which is now available in paperback. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!
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Today's Featured Book and Contest: TWAIN'S END by Lynn Cullen
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From the bestselling and highly acclaimed author of the “page-turning tale” (Library Journal, starred review) MRS. POE comes a fictionalized imagining of the personal life of America’s most iconic writer: Mark Twain.
In March of 1909, Mark Twain cheerfully blessed the wedding of his private secretary, Isabel V. Lyon, and his business manager, Ralph Ashcroft. One month later, he fired both. He proceeded to write a ferocious 429-page rant about the pair, calling Isabel “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction.” Twain and his daughter, Clara Clemens, then slandered Isabel in the newspapers, erasing her nearly seven years of devoted service to their family. How did Lyon go from being the beloved secretary who ran Twain’s life to a woman he was determined to destroy?
In TWAIN'S END, Lynn Cullen “cleverly spins a mysterious, dark tale” (Booklist) about the tangled relationships between Twain, Lyon and Ashcroft, as well as the little-known love triangle between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy, and Anne’s husband, John Macy, which comes to light during their visit to Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. Add to the party a furious Clara Clemens, smarting from her own failed love affair, and carefully kept veneers shatter.
Based on Isabel Lyon’s extant diary, Twain’s writings, letters, photographs and events in Twain’s boyhood that may have altered his ability to love, TWAIN'S END triumphs as “a tender evocation of a vain, complicated man’s twilight years and a last chance at love” (People).
-Click here to read a review.
-Click here to read an excerpt.
-Click here for the discussion guide.
-Click here to visit Lynn Cullen's official website.
-Connect with Lynn Cullen on Facebook and Twitter.
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Click here to enter the contest by Wednesday, June 8th at 11:59am ET. |
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This is a special newsletter for our Summer Reading Contests, which will mail on select days through Thursday, August 25th. This newsletter is separate from our weekly Bookreporter.com newsletter, which mails every Friday. You can subscribe to that newsletter here.
Don't forget to visit our other websites from TheBookReportNetwork.com: 20SomethingReads.com, Teenreads.com, Kidsreads.com, ReadingGroupGuides.com, GraphicNovelReporter.com and AuthorsOnTheWeb.com.
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