Evon Martins

At twelve years old, Charlotte Cleary watched her mother bleed to death in her arms after an intruder broke into their upstate New York home. He took a worthless replica Fabergé egg from the dining-room hutch. The smell of blood, and the unanswered questions surrounding her mother’s death, would haunt Charlotte for the rest of her life.

An American Woman is the intimate, unflinching portrait of Mary O’Malley, a general surgeon whose life unfolds across five transformative decades. Set against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the evolving landscape of American medicine, and the unrelenting pressure placed on ambitious women. This novel explores the enduring question: what does it cost to have it all? Mary begins her journey in the early 1970s as a determined undergraduate from a conservative Irish Catholic family. Her first love, Howie Levin, is kind, bright, and Jewish. Their relationship is doomed by cultural and religious expectations.

She thought he was a plumber. He was anything but. Anna has spent her life choosing science over love. At forty-three, she’s a brilliant Princeton chemistry professor, a celebrated researcher, and an expert at keeping her heart safely out of the equation.

In this wide-ranging collection of short stories, ordinary lives open into unexpected places. Drawn from more than two decades of writing, these stories explore love and loss, aging and memory, teaching and retirement, friendship and family, women’s lives, the bonds we share with animals, and the strange possibilities that exist just beyond the familiar world.