Madeleine L'Engle is one of our foremost and best-loved writers, and her poignant new novel, A Live Coal in the Sea, is a gripping account of a family's struggles with loyalty, faith, commitment, and identity. Its central character is the noted astronomer Dr. Camilla Dickinson, who is married to Macarios Xanthakos (whose father is an Episcopal bishop). Their son, Artaxias - a TV idol known to millions of fans as Taxi - is suffering from a career and identity crisis. He has deeply upset Raffi, his eighteen-year-old daughter, who, on a cold winter's day bursts in on Camilla, asking, "Are you or aren't you my grandmother?"This skillfully plotted narrative shuttles between the distant past and the troubled present in its search for the truth behind a generational crisis. At the quest's center is the promiscuous past of Camilla's attractive (and now dead) mother, Rose Rafferty Dickinson, and the puzzling questions: Was Rose actually Taxi's mother and, if so, who is his father? Read Less