"Rose Donovan looks for the good in everyone. With her sister-in-law, Peg, that sometimes requires a lot of searching...But after forty years of bickering, they're attempting to start over, partnering up to join the local bridge club. Peg and Rose barely have a chance to celebrate their first win before one of the club's most accomplished players is killed in his home. As the newest members, the sisters-in-law...decide to start some digging of their...

"In this ... debut, Arlene Heyman, a practicing psychiatrist, gives us what really goes on in people's minds, relationships, and beds [via seven short stories]"--Dust jacket flap.

The residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life's most profound discoveries. What they eventually learn about themselves and one another will transform them all.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in...

Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of four generations in the life of an American family. A wheelchair-bound retired historian embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for Stegner's masterpiece. Four generations in the life of an American family are chronicled as retired historian Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair, decides...

In a residential neighborhood of Lima overlooking the ocean, some well-to-do elderly people suffer the deterioration of their lives. Frasia, pressed by her economic needs, and who must work to raise her son Nico, has gradually become a vital companion to some of those older folks. If she could only manage to save up the money to buy ten guinea pigs, she could, as her uncle always told her, start a new life. Thus, every day she crosses the city by...

Ruthie Midona has worked the front desk of Providence Retirement Villa for years, living on-site at the beck and call of the wealthy residents-- and the rare tortoises that roam the lawn. Teddy Prescott, son of Providence's new owner, is in town saving up money to pursue his dream of opening a tattoo shop. He's the definition of risky, and Ruthie's dazzled-- until he mistakes her for an old lady! She has revenge in mind: her most eccentric residents,...

At the age of 90-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everythingincluding her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible...

A sus sesenta y cuatro años, Emilia se enfrenta a la remodelación de su cocina. Su marido lo ha decidido por su cuenta y ella, que solo quiere estar tranquila con sus libros, se siente incapaz de oponer resistencia. Bonnett parte de este hecho cotidiano y aparentemente banal para construir una semblanza de la plácida y peligrosa insatisfacción, y de mujeres arrinconadas por muy distintos tipos de maltratos y silencios. El paso del tiempo, su acumulación...

"The Good House tells the story of Hildy Good, who lives in a small town on Boston's North Shore. Hildy is a successful real-estate broker, good neighbor, mother, and grandmother. She's also a raging alcoholic. Hildy's family held an intervention for her about a year before this story takes place--"if they invite you over for dinner, and it's not a major holiday," she advises "run for your life"--and now she feels lonely and unjustly persecuted. She...