After a personal tragedy, writer Ava spends the summer in Woodburn, Tennessee at the invitation of an old friend and his aunts. But Woodburn Hall is anything but quiet: ancient feuds and modern-day rivalries emerge as Ava stumbles onto the darker side of the family's history, and becomes tangled in their secrets.

""A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be." In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she...

Alex has all but given up on her dreams of becoming a published author when she receives the opportunity to attend an exclusive, month-long writing retreat at the estate of feminist horror writer Roza Vallo. Even the knowledge that Wren, her former best friend and current rival, is attending doesn't dampen her excitement. Then Roza drops a bombshell: participants must all complete an entire novel from scratch during the next month, and the author...

Jones Cooper has given up his post at the Hollows Police Department and is having trouble facing a horrible event from his past. Then psychic Eloise Montgomery comes to him with predictions about his future, some of them dire. Another person in town is also working with Eloise while investigating the disappearance of his mother years ago. And fifteen-year-old Willow Graves may be heading for trouble.

"What I intend to say to you will come as a shock ..." With these words, Lady Athelinda Playford -- one of the world's most beloved children's authors -- springs a surprise on the lawyer entrusted with her will. As guests arrive for a party at her Irish mansion, Lady Playford has decided to cut off her two children without a penny . . . and leave her vast fortune to someone else: an invalid who has only weeks to live. Among Lady Playford's visitors...

"Abandoned by her mother at age seven, Alexandra Winslow took solace in the mystery stories she read with her devoted father--and soon she was writing them herself, slowly graduating to dark, violent, complex crime stories that reflected skill and imagination far beyond her years. After her father's early death, at fourteen Alex is taken in by the nuns of a local convent, where she finds twenty-six mothers to take the place of the one she lost, and...

Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through a series of eight formal addresses. From an award-acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college to a lecture on evil in Amsterdam and a sexually charged reading by the poet Robert Duncan, the author draws the reader toward its astonishing conclusion. The novel is, on its surface, the story of a woman's life as mother, sister, lover, and writer....

Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She?d lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry?s death, she decided to make one small change in her life?she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell. She channeled her grief the best way she knew: by writing a New York Times op-ed. The piece caught the attention of Peter, a Bay Area psychiatrist,...

"On discovering her murdered husband's body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlain Dubh Nai Chonaill's poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlain Dubh's life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet's girlhood...

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all...