The Third Angel

Everyday tragedy comes face to face with the magical and inexplicable in this haunting, poignant, addictive novel, which travels effortlessly across three generations and through time.

A great atmospheric storyteller . . . her books are a real pleasure

Alice Hoffman's novels are a beguiling mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Everyday occurences... are transformed under her tender gaze into magical, heartbreaking fables... mesmerisingly graceful prose

Hoffman's gift is to see how much of the mundane, how much of the everyday, is predicated upon a subtle, yet pervasive, sense of the magical

Its realism, combined with a refreshing lightness and its success in portraying emotion with empathy, draws the reader into a deep involvement with the book's appealing yet flawed characters

The Third Angel is brilliantly crafted, deeply moving, and utterly enchanting. I loved these characters for their complexity, their unpredictability and for the way they showed subtle and shifting nuance in human nature. One of the best things about Alice Hoffman's writing is that she grounds you in detail and also frees your imagination to soar to places it has never been - often simultaneously. Reading her is immensely satisfying - and addictive!

Elizabeth Berg, author of THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER I WANTED

In this elegant and stunning novel, veteran heartstring-puller Hoffman (Here on Earth; Seventh Heaven) examines the lives of three women at different crossroads in their lives, tying their London-centered stories together in devastating retrospect.

Alice Hoffman is the bestselling author of acclaimed novels, including Here on Earth (an Oprah Book Club selection), Practical Magic (a Hollywood film), The River King, Blue Diary, Turtle Moon and most recently Skylight Confessions. Blackbird House was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. She divides her time between Boston and New York City.

This haunting, poignant and addictive story travels effortlessly across time, telling the tale of three generations of women who make the wrong choices and have to live with the consequences. 
 
It opens in London in the present day, when an envious sibling comes to her sister's wedding. Back in the Swinging Sixties, the bridegroom's conventional English mother, Freida, behaves in a wholly unconventional way while working in a Knightsbridge hotel. Even before that, the seeds of tragedy are sown in the Fifties, when twelve-year-old Lucy first visits London and the same hotel. Precocious, impatient, wise beyond her years, Lucy becomes a go-between for two star-crossed lovers and then holds herself agonisingly responsible for what happens...

Skylight Confessions

A compelling novel about three generations of a family haunted by an obsessive love, from the author of Practical Magic and Here on Earth.

Visually stunning, frequently heart-wrenching

Alice Hoffman's novels are a beguiling mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Bitter everyday occurrences - broken marriages, disappointed lives - are transformed under her tender gaze into magical, heart-breaking fables... Hoffman acknowledges the weight of this pain in mesmerisingly graceful prose, while the spareness of her style allows for hope's infinite possibilities in even the most daunting of circumstances

A novel that plays with the subconcsious, weaving together magic and myth and a kind of realism. Hoffman is an excellent storyteller with a beguilingly mystical bent

A magical, haunting read, full of hidden passions, heartbreak and ghosts

The dream-like nature of the narrative is well constructed and oddly plausible

Hoffman is, in many ways, that much-misunderstood phenomenon: a novelist of ideas...This central idea of her work...is what makes the novels she has produced to date (every one a genuine page-turner) both more interesting and more rewarding than either Hollywood, or some critics, realise

Skylight Confessions leaves us sad, yet satisfied, as though we have eaten something bitter yet organic. The Greeks might have called the feeling catharsis...the Moodys are reminiscent of an ancient tragic house

Fans of The Time Traveller's Wife will love this... this is a magical, heartbreaking book

Alice Hoffman is the bestselling author of acclaimed novels, including Here on Earth (an Oprah Book Club selection), Practical Magic (a Hollywood film), The River King, Blue Diary, Turtle Moon and most recently The Third Angel. Blackbird House was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. She divides her time between Boston and New York City.

On the night that Arlyn Singer's father dies, she is certain her destiny will find her. Then John Moody shows up at her door, with no inkling that the tall, red-haired girl he has asked for directions will haunt him for the rest of his life. 
 
Years later, Arlyn is gone, leaving her children, Sam and Blanca, alone with their distant father in the glass house they have made their home. Meredith Weiss is drawn to the troubled family and sets out to try and save them. But will her devotion be enough to pull them back from the fate they seem to have chosen for themselves?

The Ice Queen

Alice Hoffman at her electrifying best, in a dark, compelling and magical novel about grief, addictive passion and second chances.

Alice Hoffman is erotic and romantic, funny and clever and humane

Alice Hoffman is a daring and able writer; she plots conjunctions of mundane and magical events with such ease that the reader never doubts her word

Like her contemporaries, Carol Shields and Alice Munro, Hoffman has an acute eye for detail - Hoffman writes with heartbreaking clarity

[Hoffman] does it beautifully, composing a lyrical tale that does not waster a single word, a shamelessly heart-breaking story that will leave barely a dry eye in the house

It's easy to get absorbed in this novel...Life is not like this, but would it be such a bad thing if there were a it more magic in the world?

Hoffman delivers one of the best plot twists I can remember

Hoffman is a skilled and experienced writer... beautifully constructed

A strangely provocative, grown-up fairy fable

Cuts deeply into the griefs and passions that shape us all and into heartbreaking secrets

Hoffman knows that good fairytales, like people, are never simple

Beautifully written, mystical and intriguing, this is a story of life, death, love and second chances. Enthralling

Alice Hoffman is at her electrifying best in this fairy tale for grown-ups. The story begins with a little girl who makes a wish one snowy night and ruins her life. She grows up with a splinter of ice in her heart until one day, standing by her kitchen window, she is struck by lightning. 
 
Instead of killing her, this cataclysmic event sparks off a new beginning. She seeks out Lazarus Jones, a fellow lightning survivor. He is her opposite, a burning man whose breath can boil water and whose touch scorches. As an obsessive love affair begins between them, both are forced to hide their most dangerous secrets - what turned one to ice and the other to fire. 
 
The Ice Queen is a haunting story of passion, loss, second chances and the secrets that come to define us, if we're not careful.

Blackbird House

Gripping and poignant, a haunting and remarkable fictional achievement - the compelling story of a house, its inhabitants, and the ghosts that haunt a spit of land, from 1778 to the present day.

Alice Hoffman is the bestselling author of many successful novels and screenplays, including Here on Earth (Oprah Book Club Choice in 1998), Illumination Nights, Turtle Moon, Practical Magic (made into a recent major film), Local Girls, The River King, Blue Diary and The Probable Future which is published simultaneously in Vintage. She lives in Massachusetts.

From the great May storm in 1778 when John Hadley and his sons slip the British blockade off the coast of Massachusetts only to disappear at sea, the lives of the inhabitants of the wooden farmhouse on the cape, stranded amid fields of sweet peas and wild fruit vines and red pear trees, coil and weave around each other, right up to the present. Young Isaac Hadley is more interested in his pet blackbird and the star charts in The Practical Navigator than in helping to build the house; and Violet, a century later, with her stained face and her own ghostly bird, reads the same book, and finds that it's easy enough to trick a learned man, though harder to catch one...Larkin Howard is ready to sell his soul to buy the farm, but meets a woman who hears the whales cry on the beach; while in another century the young Farrell boy sees more than he should on a snowy night- and the pond out back is still dark and unforgiving beneath its deceptively golden lilies. By the 1950s, the farmhouse is part of a community of steady men and wayward boys, and women who make jam but still feel the ghostly breath of Cora Hadley, with her green fingers. As a second century draws to a close and summer visitors from the cities take over the countryside, the house can barely hold all its ghosts, but the tragedies are not over... 
 
With a sense of place that is uncanny, and vividly real characters whose lives don't run smooth and whose stories loop together across space and time, this is a remarkable, haunting and accomplished work from a favourite novelist - an irresistible fiction about a house for all seasons.

The Probable Future

'Alice Hoffman is simply brilliant' Daily Mail

Magical and entertaining; at times positively bewitching... That Hoffman is a highly capable storyteller is in no doubt. Hoffman's latest novel possesses the irresistible quality of a compelling fairytale for adults

A great atmospheric storyteller... Her books are a real pleasure

Like her contemporaries, Carol Shields and Alice Munro, Hoffman has an acute yet tender eye for detail... Hoffman writes with heartbreaking clarity

An enchanting page-turner of a novel... Charming, utterly absorbing and very enjoyable, this book will leave you wanting move

When the women in the Sparrow family reach thirteen, they develop a unique ability. In young Stella's case, the gift, which is both a blessing and a curse, is the ability to see a person's probable future. Stella foresees a gruesome murder, and tells her charming, feckless father about it, but it is too late - the murder has already been committed and suspicion falls on him. 
 
Hoffman unlocks the caskets of family life and the secret history of a community in this magical story about young love and old love, about making choices - usually the wrong ones - about foresight and consequences, all suffused with the haunting scent of roses and wisteria, and the hum of bees on a summer evening.

Blue Diary

In Blue Diary Alice Hoffman is at her irresistible best - gripping, compassionate, lyrical, and full of disturbing surprises.

A moving, poignant, powerful tale about love, death, friendship and family... Blue Diary gently gets under your skin. You'll be hooked

Alice Hoffman writes quite wonderfully about the magic in our lives

Like her contemporaries, Carol Shields and Alice Munro, Hoffman has an acute eye for detail... Hoffman writes with heartbreaking clarity

Honest, shattering, seductive, and ultimately healing, Blue Diary is an unforgettable novel by a writer who tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart"

Ethan and Jorie, a perfect, beautiful couple, have been married for 13 years, and are still very much in love. Ethan is a pillar of the community, but 13 years ago he committed a brutal rape and murder. A young girl's phone call exposes him, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them - as nothing could ever be the same for that other young girl who was raped all those years ago, or for her family. 
 
Blue Diary is a powerful, disturbing novel about the dark shadows in ordinary lives, about the ripples that carry on indefinitely from a violent act. And the blue diary of the title belonged to the dead girl...

Alice Hoffman

Told from Gretel Samuelson's sly and knowing perspective, Local Girls charts her progress as she navigates from childhood to the brink of womanhood, picking her way though the tragedies and absurdities of everyday life in a family which is rocked by divorce and disaster, bad judgement and fierce attachments.  Her father has left them, her chain-smoking mother, Franny, is falling apart and refuses to learn the simple lessons of life, her perfect brother has fatal flaws, and even her best friend Jill - blonde, enviable and beautiful - is moving too fast into the unfathomable world of women.

Alice Hoffman

Books by Alice Hoffman

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