Read the Press Kit

A Barnes & Noble Discovered Author!

Literary fiction has provided readers with centuries of memorable women in trouble. Here, the author of the widely praised and beloved Come and Go Molly Snow, Kentucky novelist Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, offers Jo Sinclair, a long-term single parent of four children. Fleeing an abusive relationship, she winds up in Sea Cove, New Jersey, in front of The Breakers, a salty old hotel in the process of renovation. In this unlikely setting, Jo finds a way to renovate herself, to reclaim the promising life that was derailed by pregnancy when she was fourteen.

She impulsively convinces the owner to give her a job painting rooms and settles in with her youngest child, thirteen year old Nick. A grand cast of characters wanders through this little world, among them Iris Zephyr, the hotel's ninety-two-year old permanent boarder; Charlie, a noble mixed-breed dog; Wendy, Jo's tough 18-year-old daughter who has tattooed dragons rising out of her cleavage and who has suffered most from her mother's past mistakes; and Marco, the nearby gas station owner, who bids fair to become her mother's next mistake. Soon Victor Mangold, Jo's former teacher, and well known and exuberant poet, arrives on the premises to stir everything up.

At The Breakers is a courageous, well rendered novel about forgiveness and reconciliation. Its heroine is put through the fire, comes out with a chance for happiness, if she can muster the faith, courage and optimism to take the chance.

Mary Ann Taylor-Hall is a recipient of the Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" award. and the author of How She Knows What She Knows About Yo-yos (Sarabande), which received Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Award, and Come and Go, Molly Snow (Norton). She is the recipient of a PEN/Syndicated Fiction Award and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council.

"At Breakers is a literary tour de force and destined to become a best seller." -Louisville Courier-Journal

"Taylor-Hall is a deeply gifted writer whose stories will change your life-don't miss anything she writes. Her carefully crafted characters in At The Breakers will extend and enrich your sense of family and connection/disconnection forever."-Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Going Going

"A mother's blood guilt runs the heart of this powerful novel. When it is at last resolved, a pale flower of happiness blooms, the best any of us can expect late in a rich, complicated life."-Sallie Bingham, author of Red Car: Stories

"There are many good reasons to read At the Breakers: the perfectly drawn setting (having grown up on the South Jersey Shore, I recognized it immediately), the careful handling of complex relationships between an imperfect mother and her grown daughters, and the vivid cast that populates the hotel; but what delights me most is the character of Victor Mangold, a kind poet with great joie de vivre, with whom I couldn't help falling in love."-Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line and Mules of Love

"At the Breakers" is the hopeful tale of Jos journey as she seeks to change her destiny and follow her dreams.-Stephanie Bonnett, The Tampa Tribune