Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. She has a seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen. We follow Marie's life through her first heartbreak; her brother's brief stint as a Catholic priest; the Second World War; and into the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn.

A man reflects on the summer of his fourteenth year, where in Baton Rouge he fell in love with a golden-haired girl across the street before an unspeakable crime shattered illusions in his seemingly idyllic neighborhood.

Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she's lived since college still looks like she's just moved in. But she's got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club. She's at peace with her plus-size body--at least, most of the time--and she's on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood summer sweetheart, a man she met at the weight-loss camp that her...

When a group of friends in Mason, Missouri, decide to start a monthly supper club, they get more than they bargained for. The plan for congenial evenings-talking, laughing, and sharing recipes, homemade food, and wine-abruptly changes course one night when one of the women reveals something startlingly intimate. The supper club then becomes Confession Club, and the women gather weekly to share not only dinners but embarrassing misdeeds, deep insecurities,...

"Three Vietnamese American women mourning the death of the family matriarch recount their lives and childhoods at a crumbling, gothic manor called Banyan House, where the secrets of her grandmother's past come to light"--

Shows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter. Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every...

Jack, terminally ill and preparing to say goodbye to his family, has a miraculous recovery after his wife is killed in a car accident and struggles to reunite his family at her childhood home on the South Carolina oceanfront.

A successful author of thrillers receives a mysterious letter about an inheritance of a manor and a title from a recently deceased uncle outside London and her plans to sell the place quickly fade as she contemplates a different life.

His attractive neighbor is tugging at his heartstrings. A wealthy widow is pursuing him with hot casseroles, and his red-haired Cousin Meg has moved into the rectory, uninvited. Mitford's rector and lifelong bachelor, Father Tim, is in need of divine intervention.

"From National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home comes a moving family saga about three generations of women who struggle to find freedom and happiness in their small Midwestern college town. A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl is a poignant novel about three generations of the Wise family--Evelyn, Laura, and Grace--as they hunt for contentment amid chaos of their own making. Evelyn set aside her career...