The Kearney House: Elena & Thomas: A Peacock Alley Novel

For twenty years, Elena Vargas and Thomas Kearney were the invisible hands of the Waldorf-Astoria - a Spanish chambermaid and an Irish waiter who fell in love in a marble corridor that everyone said they had no business crossing. In the spring of 1913, with a secret marriage, a pillowcase of saved pennies, and a single perfect silver teaspoon, they walk out of the grandest hotel in America to open a twelve-room boarding house on a Brooklyn bluff above the harbor.What they build is not a small hotel. It is a home - a place where the newest and most frightened soul at the supper table always finds the good silver laid at their seat, and where the front door, against every reason to bolt it, stays open.And the world comes walking through it. A penniless Italian who dances for his rent and will one day be mourned by a hundred thousand strangers in the rain. A gentle German tuner the city turns on overnight. A drunk young poet in love with a bridge. A pianist whose music is "born" downtown without him. War, influenza, Prohibition, and the long fight for a woman's vote all climb the area steps and sit down at Elena's table - and somehow the house holds.But the heaviest thing in it is the one Elena can never set on the table: a secret from the winter of 1912, carried in silence and in her own body, a locked room inside a marriage built on the promise of crossing every distance. And when a palace calls her husband's name from across the river, she must finally decide whether a love kept safe can survive being told the whole truth.Sweeping from the Gilded Age into the roar of the Jazz Age, The Kearney House is a luminous novel about immigrants and hospitality, marriage and memory, and the quiet, radical conviction that attention is the only form of love that cannot be refused.The door is open. Come in.

Pagina's: 154, Paperback, Independently published