The Dearly Departed

With her trademark humor and warmth, the beloved author ofThe Ladies' ManandThe Inn at Lake Devineexplores going home again; about finding light in the dark corners of one's inhospitable past; about love, golf, and DNA. Everyone in King George, New Hampshire, loved Margaret Batten, part-time amateur actress, full-time wallflower, and single mother to a now-distant daughter, Sunny. But accidents happen. The death of Margaret, side by side with her putative fiance, brings Sunny back to the scene of the unhappy adolescence she thought she'd left behind. Reentry is to be dreaded; there's no hiding in a town with one diner, one doctor, one stop sign, one motel. Yet allies surface; even high school tormentors have grown up in unforeseen and gratifying ways. Just possibly, Sunny begins to think, she wasn't as beleaguered as she felt she was. And maybe her mother's life was richer than anyone suspected. Add to the mix a chief of police whose interest in Sunny exceeds his civic duty, and you have the makings of an irresistibly beguiling tale from an author who writes with all the wit and wry authority of a latter-day Jane Austen. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Elinor Lipman is the author of seven books: the novels <b>The Pursuit of Alice Thrift</b>, <b>The Dearly Departed</b>, <b>The Ladies' Man</b>, <b>The Inn at Lake Devine</b>, <b>Isabel's Bed</b>, <b>The Way Men Act</b>, <b>Then She Found Me</b>, and a collection of stories, <b>Into Love and Out Again</b>. She has been called "the diva of dialogue" (<i>People</i>) and  "the last urbane romantic" (<i>Chicago Tribune</i>). <i>Book Magazine</i> said of <b>The Pursuit of Alice Thrift</b>,  "Like Jane Austen,  the past master of the genre, Lipman isn't only out for laughs. She serves up social satire, too, that's all the more  trenchant for being deftly drawn."<br> <br>Her essays have appeared