It’s 1956, a hot August day in Greenwich Village. Tessa Castle, a struggling jazz singer with a traumatic past, is shocked to open her mailbox one day to find an envelope containing a wad of fifty-dollar bills, sent by an anonymous benefactor. Henry Wood, who fell in love with Tessa at first sight when she sang at his wedding four years ago, has been searching for her since his divorce. Leo Novak is an eccentric best-selling author suffering from a mysterious malady as well as writer’s block. Robin Quigley, a private nurse looking for a husband, lives across the hall from Tessa.
The lives of these four New Yorkers converge in a novel that encompasses the rise of rock & roll, Ike vs. Adlai, cardigan sweaters and white pumps, Yankee games on the radio, painting-by-numbers, the complications of family or lack of one, Dickens, Gershwin, twins, various wild coincidences, and—as promised by the title—those two elusive necessities, love and money.
Open Road Media, which specializes in reviving neglected backlists,has issued these seven novels as e-books and print-on-demand paperbacks.
SOLOS CHEZ CORDELIA REAL LIFE SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS THE GARDEN PATH FAMILY MATTERS VIGIL FOR A STRANGER
They are available as audiobooks via audible.com. DUET is available as an e-book from Armory New Media. LOVE AND MONEY (2022) is available from online booksellers. Most have also been issued as Kindle editions.
A FEW QUOTES FROM REVIEWS AND COMMENTS
SOLOS "Entanglements abound in this utterly charming tale of unlikely love. With a nod to its palindrome title and chapter headings, Florey's smart, funny romance can be summed up in one word: WOW!" ~Booklist
"Kitty Burns Florey seems to write from a great wellspring of inner calm that derives from a gleeful appreciation of life's smallest details. Solos is utterly engrossing." ~Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and Nobody's Fool
SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS "It would be best if you just went and read the book now.... These people seem real, and their secrets seem possible.... Fascinating." ~Hartford Courant
"The novel's achievement is that it presents several generations...with keen insight, tracing their specific eccentricities and shedding light on family dynamics in general.... Florey inhabits each character so fully that the reader settles into each new perspective with ease.... Readers might feel sorry to leave Florey's fictional family behind." ~Newsday
DUET "This story of obsessive love [is] a very appealing tale." ~ Publishers Weekly
VIGIL FOR A STRANGER "A chilling, eloquent novel that draws you in with mystery and holds you there with love, obsession, failure, insanity, and an enchanting hybrid of past and present." ~ Kirkus Reviews REAL LIFE "Florey's fourth novel offers warm humor laced with a range of emotional nuance that does justice to her appealing characters." -Publishers Weekly
CHEZ CORDELIA "Humor and honesty … poignant and affecting … this novel works!" ~Michelle Slung, Washington Post FAMILY MATTERS "Written with sensitivity and skill, Family Matters displays an eye for telling detail combined with a wider vision of a character's place within her family, her community, her culture." ~ New York Times Book Review
"Family Matters is a fine book, constructed with subtlety and skill, written straightforwardly and elegantly, with depth of feeling and breadth of perception and without affectation of style or sentiment. -Mary Furness, Times Literary Supplement
