An enchanting, comic love letter to sibling rivalry and the English language.From the author compared to Norah Ephron and Nancy Mitford, not to mention Jane Austen, comes a new novel celebrating the beauty, mischief, and occasional treachery of language. The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret "twin" tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but...

From the author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport, a wise, clever story of New York in the ’60sIt’s 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn’t seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging ’60s. He soon learns that Lady—giddy, careless, urgent, and obsessed with being free—is as much his responsibility as he is hers.     So begins Fin & Lady, the lively, spirited new novel by Cathleen Schine, the author of the bestselling The Three Weissmanns of Westport. Fin and Lady lead their lives against the background of the ’60s, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War—Lady pursued by ardent, dogged suitors, Fin determined to protect his impulsive sister from them and from herself.     From a writer The New York Times has praised as “sparkling, crisp, clever, deft, hilarious, and deeply affecting,” Fin & Lady is a comic, romantic love story: the story of a brother and sister who must form their own unconventional family in increasingly unconventional times.ReviewPraise for The Three Weissmanns of Westport“Full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to Austen’s own.” —The New York Review of Books“A clever, frothy novel . . . Schine playfully probes the lies, self-deceptions, and honorable hearts of her characters.” —The New YorkerAbout the AuthorCathleen Schine is the author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport, The New Yorkers, and The Love Letter, among other novels. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review.

In this "witty novel about family, friendship, and survival of the fittest,"Cathleen Schine, one of our most astute social observers, examines the origin of species alongside the origins of who we come to be.In some mysterious family feud or unintended slight, Jane Barlow Schwartz lost a friend, her cousin and soul mate, Martha. But years later, surrounded by the exotic wildlife of the Galapagos, Jane and Martha meet again. There, amid the antics of blue-footed boobies and red-lipped batfish, Jane sets off on a quest through her family history to pinpoint the moment when Martha was no longer the Martha she knew. In the process, she ponders instinct, natural selection, and the oddities of evolution that transform us. As Barbara Kingsolver proclaimed in The New York Times Book Review, "We should rejoice in a rare novel like The Evolution of Jane . . . A rollicking family saga tinged with hints of sexual intrigue . . . Three cheers."Elle

In this delightful novel from an author who "has been favored in so many ways by the muse of comedy,"we meet Margaret Nathan, the brilliant but forgetful author of an unlikely bestseller. Happily married to a benevolently egotistical, slightly dull but sexy professor, Margaret seems blessed—until she finds herself seduced by an eighteenth-century novel she discovers in the library.Wrapped in its lascivious world, Margaret begins to imitate its protagonist, embarking on a hilarious jaunt around Manhattan in search of renewed passion. Will she find fulfillment through her escapades or settle for her husband? Part romantic comedy, part intellectual parody, Rameau's Niece is wise, affecting, and thoroughly entertaining.New York Review of Books

The Love Letter was a beloved and bestselling novel, and "She Is Me" is a return to that winning form--a novel about women's friendships, love, and family.

From one of America's greatest comic novelists, a hilarious new novel about aging, family, loneliness, and loveThe Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don't just grow, they grow old, and the clan's matriarch, Joy, is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would have wished. When Joy's beloved husband dies, Molly and Daniel have no shortage of solutions for their mother's loneliness and despair, but there is one challenge they did not count on: the reappearance of an ardent suitor from Joy's college days. And they didn't count on Joy herself, a mother suddenly as willful and rebellious as their own kids.The New York Times–bestselling author Cathleen Schine has been called "full of invention, wit, and wisdom that can bear comparison to [ Jane] Austen's own" (The New York Review of Books), and she is at her best in this...

A bookseller is obsessed with a mysterious love note in the New York Times–bestselling author's "sophisticated and witty valentine of a novel" (People). Intelligent, sexy, and fortyish, Helen MacFarquhar is a woman in control of her life and everyone in it—until an anonymous love letter falls into her hands one summer morning. Helen has been leading a blissful existence as the proprietor of a small bookstore in a quaint New England seaside town. She beguiles her customers into buying the titles she recommends, and flirts shamelessly with nearly every one of the town's eccentric residents. But Helen's self-confidence falters when the love letter arrives in her mail. "How do you fall in love?" the letter asks, and the question becomes Helen's obsession, in this "smart, moving, and funny" story by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport and They May Not Mean To, But They Do...

EDITORIAL REVIEW: Jane Austen’s beloved *Sense and Sensibility* has moved to Westport, Connecticut, in this enchanting modern-day homage to the classic novel *When Joseph Weissmann divorced his wife, he was seventy eight years old and she was seventy-five . . . He said the words “Irreconcilable differences,” and saw real confusion in his wife’s eyes.* *“Irreconcilable differences?” she said. “Of course there are irreconcilable differences. What on earth does that have to do with divorce?”* Thus begins *The Three Weissmanns of Westport*, a sparkling contemporary adaptation of *Sense and Sensibility *from the always winning Cathleen Schine, who has already been crowned “a modern-day Jewish Jane Austen” by *People*’s Leah Rozen. In Schine’s story, sisters Miranda, an impulsive but successful literary agent, and Annie, a pragmatic library director, quite unexpectedly find themselves the middle-aged products of a broken home. Dumped by her husband of nearly fifty years and then exiled from their elegant New York apartment by his mistress, Betty is forced to move to a small, run-down Westport, Connecticut, beach cottage. Joining her are Miranda and Annie, who dutifully comes along to keep an eye on her capricious mother and sister. As the sisters mingle with the suburban aristocracy, love starts to blossom for both of them, and they find themselves struggling with the dueling demands of reason and romance.