David R. Godine,
Oct. 2020
n fictional Alstead, Maine, the Senter family — parents Tup and Doris and children Sonny, Dodie and Beston — live off the 236 acres of good land that’s been in Tup’s family for generations, and in which Tup’s forbearers are buried. In alternating chapters, Doris, Tup and Dodie take turns describing a quiet, steady life of hard work and deep contentment as they run their dairy farm. But it doesn’t take long for Doris to make an assertion that presages a tragedy that will turn the family of five to a family of four: “I have learned that nothing terrible is going to happen here. You have to be careful, to pay attention, and then you just trust that everything is going to be all right. It’s a price you pay for the quiet and beauty of the land.”
Indeed, the heart of “Beneficence,” divided into sections titled “Before,” “During,” “After” and “Now,” is a tragic accident and the manner in which it shapes the surviving Senters. Doris sinks into a nearly paralytic depression that threatens to take the entire family down. Tup escapes into his work, which soon includes a second job that becomes a second life in a nearby town. Dodie struggles to balance her own grief and her new role as the de facto family center, embodying the beneficence — an act of charity or mercy rooted in moral obligation — that gives the novel, Hall’s first, its name.
A former professor in UNH’s writing program and the author of the prize-winning memoir “Without a Map,” Hall writes with restraint and grace about love and loss and how a family heals when a hole is blown through its center.
UNC Press,
Dec. 2020
hen James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation’s leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. “The Strange Genius of Mr. O” is at once the biography of a remarkable performer—a gaunt Scottish orator who made appearances wearing a toga — and a story of the United States during the founding era. In her second book, Eastman, an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, examines Ogilvie’s roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him.
Rodale Kids,
Sept. 2020
an Brown became a household name following the 2003 publication of “The DaVinci Code,” an imaginative mystery thriller about the life of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. In “Wild Symphony,” a children’s picture book that follows Maestro Mouse through the trees and across the seas with his musical friends, Brown takes his imagination in a different direction entirely. The story, aimed at children age 3-7, is paired with original music and an application that plays the songs that correspond to specific pages as they are read. Lord, CEO of North Hampton, New Hampshire-based PARMA Recordings, served as producer for the musical aspects of the project and worked on the orchestration alongside Brown and Blench. The symphony is being performed in locations around the world and will have its U.S. debut at the Portsmouth Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in July.
Rodale Kids,
Sept. 2020
an Brown became a household name following the 2003 publication of “The DaVinci Code,” an imaginative mystery thriller about the life of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. In “Wild Symphony,” a children’s picture book that follows Maestro Mouse through the trees and across the seas with his musical friends, Brown takes his imagination in a different direction entirely. The story, aimed at children age 3-7, is paired with original music and an application that plays the songs that correspond to specific pages as they are read. Lord, CEO of North Hampton, New Hampshire-based PARMA Recordings, served as producer for the musical aspects of the project and worked on the orchestration alongside Brown and Blench. The symphony is being performed in locations around the world and will have its U.S. debut at the Portsmouth Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in July.