Your Storyteller

As seen in Moment Magazine.

It's been a week since the funeral, and Mali is at her mother's Manhattan apartment, ready to pack it up. At least that's what she thinks, until she discovers a manila envelope propped up against the back of her mother's desk, and filled with a mass of unsent letters. Her mother's handwriting on the lined notepaper is so familiar, and the slight German accent Mali hears ticking through her words, so haunting.

Mali reads the memories of her mother's Jewish childhood in 1930s Berlin, then her life in war-torn London. But when she comes to her mother's account of her too-early marriage and the divorce that forced her to leave her young daughter in London and go to New York, Mali is thrust back into her own unhappy childhood, where that relentless ache for her absent mother, lodged like a stony pit inside her, must now be reconciled.

"Marlis Manley’s heartfelt novel of the heartland goes nowhere fast in all the best of ways. It moves and moves us." –Michael Martone, author of The Complete Writing of Art Smith

It's summer 1957, and when 14-year-old Sandy Turner goes missing—along with one of her late mother's hidden scrapbooks—Aunt Maggie can think of only one place the girl might be.

Frank Haggard, the race-car driver in those yellowing news clippings, assumes the girl claiming to be his daughter is a fan acting on a dare, until Maggie tracks them down. Memories of his annulled marriage to Maggie's sister flood over him, and the timing couldn't be worse. With the first-ever National Championship for stock cars a week away, the last thing he needs is a child-custody battle with Maggie-as determined as she is beautiful. When the car he's planned to pilot is turned over to a younger driver, Frank and Maggie make the riskiest deal of their lives-her savings for a race car, but if Frank wins, he gives up his daughter.