Inside a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, off the South Carolina coast, is a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. It is to Egret Island that Jessie Sullivan, a woman whose life has been constrained by circumstances, to care for her mother, who hasn't yet recovered from Jessie's father's death 33 years before. As Jessie contemplates the separation...

Set in England, this is a novel about a successful career woman in her forties who renounces the world to enter Brede monastery, a cloistered order of English Benedictine nuns and what happens to her thereafter.

Ya-Yas in bloom reveals the roots of the Ya-Yas' friendship in the 1930s and roars with all the raw power of Vivi Abbott Walker's 1962 T-Bird through sixty years of marriage, child-raising, and hair-raising family secrets.