Running the Bulls (29 page)

The Funeral Makers

A century after the impulsive McKinnon brothers set out to tame the Canadian wilderness and instead landed in Mattagash, Maine, their madcap legacy reigns supreme. It's 1959, and Pearl and Sicily McKinnon have gathered to plan a funeral for Marge, their older sister dying from the rare disease beriberi, thanks to her eccentric diet.

Pearl, who skipped town with big-city dreams only to marry a funeral director, soon clashes with the long-suffering Sicily, who herself is coping with an unfaithful husband. To make matters worse, Sicily's teenage daughter is lusting after the town's blackest sheep, a ne'er-do-well twice her age.

Brimming with darkly quirky humor and irresistible spunk,
The Funeral Makers
explores the inescapable ironies of American life and family dynamics and captures the spirit of a world that is at once familiar and quickly fading from view.

Praise for
The Funeral Makers

“Hilariously irreverent, comic, tragic, and lyrical…” —
New York Times Book Review

“A crazy, rollicking whoop of a book, written with a poet's sensibility and a deeply wacky down-home wisdom.” —Lee Smith, author of
The Last Girls

“A bitingly funny and highly original novelist.” —
Vogue

“
The Funeral Makers
completely satisfies…a clear-eyed yet passionate examination of life in an isolated small town, where the road ends.” —
Newsday

The Bubble Reputation

Available November 2014 from Sourcebooks Landmark

Rosemary O'Neal lived for eight years with William in a rambling country house in Maine. Then William committed suicide on a trip to London, leaving her with questions, anger, and no way to say good-bye. When her zany family descends on the house, bringing a tidal wave of casseroles and their own petty problems, Rosemary retreats with her cat from the chaos of the world around them. (Her cat understands human nature better than
Homo sapiens
anyway.) It takes an unsettling turn of events to shock her back into the pitfalls of living and realize that life is a fleeting experience to be carefully savored.

Award-winning author Cathie Pelletier has been called “a bitingly funny, highly original novelist.” In
The Bubble Reputation
, she redefines “dysfunctional” in this bittersweet, life-affirming story about the idiosyncrasies of family, the anguish of grief, and finding peace after chaos.

Praise for
The Bubble Reputation

“Cathie Pelletier accomplishes what every great novelist should. She creates a place, invites you in, walks you around, talks to you, lets you see and feel and hear it, allows you to get to know the people.” —Fannie Flagg, author of
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café

A Marriage Made at Woodstock

Available December 2014 from Sourcebooks Landmark

Fred and Lorraine Stone met and fell in love at the famous music festival in upstate New York. But as all couples must, they grew up—just not in the same direction. Now in their forties, Fred has morphed into Frederick, a respectable accountant whose last vestige of his younger years is a vegetarian diet. Meanwhile, Lorraine goes by the name Chandra (that's Sanskrit for
changeable
), an occasional psychology teacher and animal rights activist.

When Chandra suddenly moves out, Frederick begins to wonder whether they were as different on the inside as they had become on the outside. Upset, he turns back to that magical time in their lives, Woodstock, where they first fell in love. Can he discover what went wrong? Or has the atmosphere of free love and marital harmony left them behind?

Praise for
A Marriage Made at Woodstock

“Cathie Pelletier…[is] in top form. The real marriage here is the natural union of humor and sadness.” —Richard Russo, author of
Nobody's Fool

Author photo by Doug Burns

Cathie Pelletier was born and raised on the banks of the St. John River, at the end of the road in northern Maine. She is the author of eleven other novels, including
The
One-Way Bridge
,
The
Funeral
Makers,
and
The Weight of Winter,
winner of the New England Booksellers Award for fiction. As K. C. McKinnon, she has written two novels, both of which became television films. After years of living in Nashville, Tennessee; Toronto, Canada; and Eastman, Quebec, she has returned to Allagash, Maine, and the family homestead where she was born.