After a messy break up with her longtime boyfriend, a woman faces losing both her house and her business. Consequently, she takes in three roommates: a freckled college graduate, a mysterious divorced man, and a recently widowed female chef.

When college student David Rain rents a room in an unusual boardinghouse full of clay dragons, he has no idea that they, along with some lively squirrels, will help jumpstart his writing career.

While researching the existence of dragons for an essay that could win him a trip to the Arctic, Chris opens himself to the possibility that a great, ancient treasure exists there, guarded by bears, and that he has some role in its protection.

It's late 1944. Hitler's rockets are raining down on London with vicious regularity and it's the coldest winter in living memory. The Allies are gaining ground, but victory is certainly dragging its feet. In a large house next to Hampstead Heath, Vee Sedge is barely scraping by with a herd of lodgers to feed and her young charge Noel, almost fifteen now, to clothe and educate. When she witnesses an accident and finds herself in court, the repercussions...

"For young widow Ellen Wood, her Victorian home is a refuge--a place to feel safe with her eleven-year-old son, Charlie. But when money grows so tight that Ellen could lose the house, her sister, Hannah, makes a radical suggestion...rent out some of the rooms. Soon Ellen has three lodgers: Sabine, a German coworker of Hannah's, recently separated from her husband; Allegra, an eccentric but wise novelist; and Matt, an up-and-coming young journalist...