Fiction, Fiction Subjects

Second Chances

Name: Second Chances
Author: Alice Adams
ISBN: 9780307798268

by Alice Adams

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Overview

“Alice Adams turns dreams and moments, the stuff of memories, inside out and makes of them beautiful, haunting, bittersweet tales.” --Publishers Weekly

Second Chances, perhaps Alice Adams most accomplished novel, is a rich, moving, and beautifully drawn portrait of six women and men, friends for years, who suddenly, and with amazement, find themselves growing old.

They live in a beautiful small California town called San Sebastian, and they see each other almost daily-- Dudley and Sam Venable; Edward Crane and his younger lover, Freddy Fuentes; the widowed Celeste Timberlake; the eccentric, secretive Polly Blake. With generosity and humor and remarkable insight, Adams takes us into rich emotional territory in a novel that evokes the ways in which people continually astonish themselves, at any age, with their capacity for wonder and change.

About the Author, Alice Adams

Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia and raised in North Carolina, and graduated from Radcliffe College. She was the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award. She was the author of five collections of short stories and ten novels, among them Listening to Billie, Superior Women, Second Chances, and A Southern Exposure. She lived in San Francisco until her death in 1999.