This image is the cover for the book Temporary Shelter

Temporary Shelter

A book of profound and candid stories by one of America’s best novelists
Temporary Shelter is a collection of twenty expertly crafted short stories by Mary Gordon. The characters here are of diverse ages, classes, and nationalities, yet all are alike in their desperate need of safe harbor. A crippled girl must contend not only with disability, but also with her toxic mother and aunts, who block her on the path to maturity. Elsewhere, a woman afflicted by a fearful anxiety that has given her a “death in life” grapples with how not to pass the same curse on to her daughter.
As in Gordon’s acclaimed novels, these stories dissect fraught relationships between men and women, from the shattering effects of divorce to marriages turned numb and cold. Skillfully and empathetically plumbing her characters’ depths, Gordon yields rare catharsis with Temporary Shelter. 

Mary Gordon

Born in New York to a Catholic mother and a father who converted to Catholicism from Judaism, Mary Gordon was raised in a strict, religious environment and at one time considered becoming a nun. She attended Barnard College and in 1978 published her first novel, Final Payments. She followed that with The Company of Women (1981), both books exploring the challenges faced by young Catholic women as they make their way in the larger, secular world. Her other novels include Men and Angels (1985), The Other Side (1989), Spending (1998), and Pearl (2005), the story of an Irish-American mother forced to reexamine her faith and political ideals as her daughter slowly starves herself during a hunger strike in Ireland.

Open Road Integrated Media