When a riot breaks out in the prison she is visiting, law professor Natalie Greco witnesses the death of a prison guard whose last words reveal a dangerous conspiracy, putting Nat into a situation in which she is targeted by murderers and the police.

In the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn, 60-year-old human rights scholar Richard Bowmaster hits the car of Evelyn Ortega, a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes a far more serious turn when Evelyn turns up at the professor's house seeking help. At a loss, the professor asks his tenant Lucia Maraz, a 62-year-old lecturer from Chile, for her advice. These three very different people are...

Olive adjusts to her new life with her second husband, challenges her estranged son and his family to accept him, experiences loss and loneliness, witnesses the triumphs and heartbreaks of her friends and neighbours in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine - and, finally, opens herself to new lessons about life.

In present-day New Orleans, Polly Deschamps finds herself at yet another lonely crossroads in her life until she encounters architect Marshall Marchand, a lifelong bachelor who spends most of his time with his brother Danny. When Polly's two young daughters from her previous marriage are likewise taken with Marshall, she marries him. But then an ominous prediction by a New Orleans tarot card reader proclaims that Polly will murder her husband, and...

When Pete discovers that his teacher is sick and his mom is the substitute, he must teach her the ins and outs of his school.

Louise is determined to earn straight A's in second grade, but her teacher, Mrs. Pearl, is known for not giving out that special grade.

Neil, the narrator, takes Elizabeth Finch's class on Culture and Civilization, taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages; we are drawn into his intellectual crush on this private, withholding yet commanding woman. While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil's grasp, Elizabeth's application of her material to the matter of daily living remains important to him, even after her death, in a way that nothing else...

Returning home to his family's California winery, Professor Julian Vos, on sabbatical from his Ivy League job, finds himself distracted from his plans to write a novel by eccentric, chronically late, unbelievably beautiful gardener Hallie Welch, who is aburst of color in his gray-scale life.

When 16-year-old Glory, Tresa Fischer's wild-child younger sister, turns up dead on a beach near Mark and Hilary's Florida hotel, Mark becomes the number one murder suspect. Det. Cab Bolton, who isn't one to jump to conclusions, travels from Florida to Wisconsin to unravel Mark--and Glory's--complicated lives.