"A novella that reads like an epic part prison story hospital-ward drama, family tragedy, and historical flight of fancy...[An] enigmatic and challenging debut."---Los Angeles Times<BR><BR>"A brave and deeply moving first novel."---Lorrie Moure<BR><BR>"A bone-chilling family drama...Pitch perfect...Succinct, intelligent, and complerely unsentimental...Wavemaker II introduces a beautiful new voice in fiction."---Time Out New York<BR><BR>"The most important and surprising first novel I've read in years, full of subtlety and compassion and paradoxical empathy for a world-class scoundrel-Hughes's elegant provocations get into you like a virus, and their traces kick around for a long time after.---Rick Moody<BR><BR>"[Wavemaker II] is, in all senses of the word, a composed work of fiction...Elegantly constructed."---The Washington post.<BR><BR>"An assured collection...of stylish, intricate stories about seemingly ordinary people...whose secrets, discoveries, longings, and subterfuges are anything but. [Hughes is] an emerging master of the form."---Lisa Shea, Elle<BR><BR>Best-selling and widely acclaimed author Mary-Beth Hughes, "a writer of dexterity and imagination" (The New York Times Book Review), delivers a seductive, deeply human, and sophisticated story collection about the universal need to be loved, and the complicated imperfections that jeopardize the ties that bind us.<BR><BR>The stories in Double Happiness are extraordinary portrayals of the ordinariness of life. By pinpointing those moments of discord when personal needs and morality clash with circumstances beyond our control, Hughes challenges our concepts of responsibility, trust, resilience, and betrayal. In "Pelican Song," a thirty-year-old modern dancer who moon-lights as a movie-ticket taker visits her parents' picturesque home only to discover that her stepfather has begun mistreating her too-accommodating mother; "Horse" follows maladjusted honeymooners in Atlantic City whose romantic weekend is saved from emotional catastrophe by a bored horse that refuses to dive from its pedestal into the ocean; and a mini-holiday in New York City turns from a shopping spree and tea at the Plaza to a young girl's sharp discovery of her father's secret life in "Rome."<BR><BR>With an elegant blend of humor and pathos, Hughes captures the turning points in relationships that make us wonder how well we really know the people we love, and ourselves. Full of improbably paired characters whose differences serve to unearth the vulnerabilities, idiosyncrasies, and compromises that unite and divide us, Double Happiness is a revealing meditation on the fragility of contentment and the lengths we must go to in order to sustain it.