The Tattooed Heart and My Name is Rose

The Tattooed Heart (1953): June Grey spends a green and dreaming summer alone with her grandmother in a large isolated house at Grey's Neck on the Long Island shore. Around the house are wooded hills that give down to beach and sea, and in these woods June meets the boy Ronny, younger than herself and still firmly anchored in the fantasies of childhood which June is on the point of leaving. Eventually the youngsters become cruelly caught up in the complicated motives and desires of their elders.
 
My Name Is Rose (1956): Written partly in the form of a journal and partly in conventional narrative, Theodora Keogh's novel is a kind of 'examination of conscience,' by a young wife whose marriage is breaking up after seven years.  Original in its perceptions, strong in story, and clearly written in a highly personal idiom which gives all Theodora Keogh’s work a mysterious and pulsating quality which is the sign of life.

The Tattooed Heart and My Name is Rose were selected for Pharos Editions and introduced by Lidia Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase, The Chronology of Water)