An inside look at the lives of eight people living in a remote and icy Scottish village. The story focuses on the relationship between a mother and a daughter, played by real-life mother and daughter Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law.

When Katy's mother dies, she is left reeling. Carol wasn't just Katy's mom, but her best friend and first phone call. She had all the answers and now, when Katy needs her the most, she is gone. To make matters worse, their planned mother-daughter trip of a lifetime looms: two weeks in Positano, the magical town Carol spent the summer right before she met Katy's father. Katy has been waiting years for Carol to take her, and now she is faced with embarking...

"For eighteen years, Jude Farraday has put her children's needs above her own, and it shows: her twins, Mia and Zach, are bright and happy teenagers. When Lexi Baill moves into their small, close knit community, no one is more welcoming than Jude. Lexi, a former foster child with a dark past, quickly becomes Mia's best friend. Then Zach falls in love with Lexi and the three become inseparable. Jude does everything to keep her kids on track for college...

Charley Benetto, an alcoholic considering suicide, is given the chance to spend one more day with his mother, who had died eight years earlier.

A mother and daughter on vacation in Paris unpack a lifetime of secrets and hopes—with a giant Pattersonian twist at the end! Every daughter has her own distinctive voice, her inimitable style, and her secrets. Laurie is an artist, a collector of experiences. She travels the world with a worn beige duffel bag. Every mother has her own distinctive voice, her inimitable style, and her secrets. “Dr. Liz,” Laurie’s mother, is an elegant perfectionist...

"Working from home in the close quarters of their Florida house, Sammie lives with one wary eye peeled on Samson, a sullen, unknowable boy who resists her every attempt to bond with him. Uncertain in her own feelings about motherhood, she tries her best--driving, cleaning, cooking, prodding him to finish projects for school--while growing increasingly resentful of Monika, her confident but absent wife. As Samson grows from feral toddler to surly teenager,...

At seventeen, Rosalind Townsend finds herself pregnant and alone. Her father, deeply religious yet cruel, throws her out of the house. Nick Pemberton, her baby's father and the man she naively hoped to marry, rejects her. Yet even at the lowest point in her life, Rosalind vows to succeed on her own terms, and to give her son, Will, all the love and happiness she's been denied.

When a baby bird hatches while his mother is out searching for food, he leaves the nest for a series of adventures to try to determine his mother's identity..

"Eight-year-old Edgar Fini remembers nothing of the accident people still whisper about. He only knows that his father is gone, his mother has a limp, and his grandmother believes in ghosts. When Edgar meets a man with his own tragic story, the boy begins a journey into a secret wilderness where nothing is clear: not even the line between the living and the dead. In order to save her son, Lucy has no choice but to confront the demons of her past."--Amazon.com....

'I seem to have a life only for other people.' Lambert Strether, a mild middle-aged American of no particular achievements, is dispatched to Paris from the manufacturing empire of Woollett, Massachusetts. The mission conferred on him by his august patron, Mrs. Newsome, is to discover what, or who, is keeping her son Chad in the notorious city of pleasure, and to bring him home. But Strether finds Chad transformed by the influence of a remarkable woman;...