Glad Farm: A Memoir

Eliciting comparisons to "The Glass Castle" and the works of Elena Ferrante, "Glad Farm" is a stunning new memoir that readers can't put down. Raised in a primitive one-room farmhouse with no indoor plumbing, the fourth of five children, Catherine Marenghi begins her life in poverty and isolation, but is propelled forward by the love and support of her family. A decade after leaving home at the age of seventeen, she is a successful journalist with the means to buy her family their first decent house. But the past will not be put to rest so easily. Catherine unravels a web of long-buried family secrets, and a terrible betrayal that robbed her family of the home that was rightfully theirs. And she finally learns the story her parents never shared: the gladiolus farm that was once their dream. At once lyrical and raw, unflinching in its detail, "Glad Farm" is an iconic American story of renewal and reinvention, and the mythic power of a house to define our destiny.