Positions With White Roses

After a self-imposed twelve year exile in Europe, a young woman returns home to settle accounts with her twin sister Laura and her parents. It is the Christmas holidays, but this homecoming goes awry from the start. For years the elderly parents have hardly spoken to one another, and Laura — is inexplicably absent. And yet, as the parents and the visiting daughter assume their positions around the Christmas dinner table and its centerpiece of white roses, Laura's absence is transformed into a palpably overpowering presence. With deceptive simplicity —Molinaro's literary hallmark — the stage is set for an explosive confrontation as the family's story unfolds in what Marianne Hauser has called "a superb achievement, highly readable, profound and unrivaled."

"A world of conflicting emotions is packed into the book — a slim novel as novels go. . . . Yet as we reach the end, we are enriched and dazzled, as if we had been whisked through a cosmic adventure." — American Book Review "Molinaro writes with grace and originality, revealing a razor-sharp humor and sensibility." — New Women's Times Feminist Review

"Unexpectedly engaging." — ALA Booklist

"Molinaro creates a perfect, perfectly shocking conclusion, forceful in its symmetry, as inevitable as the conclusion of a classical tragedy." — Belles Lettres

"Mesmerizing and haunting, yet entirely ringing true. . . . spine-tingling." — Fiction (London)