The Secrets of a Fire King

Award-winning stories from Kim Edwards, author of the UK Number 1 bestseller The Memory Keeper's Daughter

The Secrets of a Fire King gives eloquence to an astonishing range of discoveries and leaves the reader entranced

Beautifully focused. Edwards' tales read like the work of a wise traveller who returns home with uncommon souvenirs from other lands.

Impeccable, a treasure. Edwards shows herself to be a fully realised writer. Edwards' brilliance is evident in the way she contstructs a story.

Kim Edwards is the author of the multi-million-copy No.1 bestseller, The Memory Keeper's Daughter. She spent 5 years with her husband in Asia where they taught in Malaysia, Japan and Cambodia. During her time in Asia, she began to publish short fiction, and in 1990 her story Sky Juice won the Nelson Algren Award. Her stories and essays have since appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Anteaus, Story, and The Paris Review. They have won many honors, including a National Magazine Award for Excellence in Fiction and a Pushcart Prize, as well as inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. Kim Edwards received a Whiting Writers&rsquo; Award in 2002 and is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

Young, fiery and bright, Eshlaini has her whole future ahead of her &ndash; until her father condemns her to a life of spinsterhood. 
 
Joyce has settled into Malaysian life after thirty years as an ex-pat wife &ndash; or so she thinks, until a newcomer arrives and reveals just how little of her home she knows. 
 
Jade Moon wants the best for her family &ndash; but, surrounded by Americans who reject her Korean traditions, she must first work out what &lsquo;the best&rsquo; means. 
 
Though cultures and distances separate them, their experiences reflect our universal fears and desires. From a breathtaking island off Singapore to upstate New York and France, Kim Edwards takes in the world, compassionately and gracefully exploring the obstacles of time, place and circumstance in all of our quests for love, happiness and acceptance.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

The second highest selling novel through Bookscan in 2007, selling over 700,000 copies in the UK alone

The multi-million copy bestseller, Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a moving and poignant novel about grief, family and betrayal. 
 
Families have secrets they hide even from themselves... 
 
It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five lives for ever. 
 
For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse. 
 
As grief quietly tears apart David's family, so a little girl must make her own way in the world as best she can. 
 
'Crafted with language so lovely you have to reread the passages just to be captivated all over again . . . this is simply a beautiful book' Jodi Picoult 
 
'I loved this riveting story with its intricate characters and beautiful language' Sue Monk Kidd, author of the best-selling, The Secret Life of Bees 
 
Kim Edwards is the author of the short-story collection The Secrets of the Fire King, which was an alternate for the 1998 PEN/Hemingway Award, and has won the Whiting Award and the Nelson Algren Award. Her second novel, The Lake of Dreams, is available from Penguin. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

Crafted with language so lovely you have to reread the passages just to be captivated all over again . . . this is simply a beautiful book

I loved this riveting story with its intricate characters and beautiful language

Sue Monk Kidd, author of the best-selling

Kim Edwards is the author of the short-story collection The Secrets of the Fire King, which was an alternate for the 1998 PEN/Hemingway Award, and has won the Whiting Award and the Nelson Algren Award. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

Families have secrets they hide even from themselves... 
 
It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five lives for ever. 
 
For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse. 
 
As grief quietly tears apart David's family, so a little girl must make her own way in the world as best she can.

Kim Edwards

An absorbing, perceptive and moving tale that fans of The Memory Keeper's Daughter will lap up

Beautifully plotted and breathtakingly accomplished

The darkest secrets are the ones we hide from ourselves... 
 
Ten years ago, traumatized by her father's death, Lucy left her home and her country. Now, she returns to her family's rambling lakeside home to lay old ghosts to rest. 
 
However, sleepless one night, she makes a momentous discovery. Locked in a moonlit window seat is a collection of family heirlooms - objects whose secrets no one was ever supposed to find. Piecing together her family's true history, she realises that the story she has always been told was a fiction. And the more she uncovers, the more Lucy comes to question her own life choices - including why it is that her first lover, Keegan Fall, has never left her heart . . . 
 
Mesmerizing and haunting, The Lake of Dreams is a startling story of family secrets and lies, lost love and redemption, and of the many pieces and puzzles that make up a life.

Kim Edwards

Praise for The Lake of Dreams

An absorbing, perceptive and moving tale that fans of The Memory Keeper's Daughter will lap up

Beautifully plotted and breathtakingly accomplished

An emotional novel with lyrical touches

An absorbing, perceptive and moving tale that fans of The Memory Keeper's Daughter will lap up

Beautifully plotted and breathtakingly accomplished

An emotional novel with lyrical touches

An absorbing, perceptive and moving tale that fans of The Memory Keeper's Daughter will lap up

Beautifully plotted and breathtakingly accomplished

An emotional novel with lyrical touches

Books by Kim Edwards

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