Alice McDermott's powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution,...

Ten years ago, Tom Drury's groundbreaking debut, The End of Vandalism, was serialized in the New Yorker, was compared to the work of Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner by USA Today, and was named a Best Book of the Year in multiple publications. Welcome to Grouse County-a fictional Midwest that is at once familiar and amusingly eccentric-where a thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice, a lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty...

All of the barnyard animals are excited about the arrival of a new duckling, until the noisy little one refuses to go to sleep.

When Leda's daughters leave home to be with their father, she decides to take a trip to a small coastal town in Italy, but soon after she arrives memories from her unsettled past come back to haunt her.

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...

Although she still prays for Caleb, Nellie Mae Fisher has broken up with her beau, and now, her heart's greatest longing is for more knowledge of the Lord. Caleb must stay in Honeybrook as caretaker for his crippled father, but he hopes Nellie will return to the Old Order and to him.

Join the unsuspecting Jemima Puddle-Duck as she foolishly allows the cunning Fox to help her find a "safe" nest.

Determined to win a trophy at her school's fall festival and outshine her frenemy Alexa, Marya throws herself into selling the most tickets, but as she becomes laser-focused on victory, she begins to lose sight of what truly matters.

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.

"Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life's unfulfilled promises; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt. Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family...