A selection of unabridged stories from the bestselling author of Goodnight Nobody. Jennifer Weiner's talent shines like never before in this collection of short stories, following the tender, and often hilarious, progress of love and relationships over the course of a lifetime. From a teenager coming to terms with her father's disappearance to a moving portrait of men's fears about commitment and love, Weiner's stories explore those transformative...

Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength...

"A novel about teenager Emmie Blue, who releases a balloon with her email address and a big secret into the sky, only to fall head-over-heels for the boy who finds it; now, fourteen years later, the one thing Emmie has been counting on is gone for good, and everything she planned is up in the air"--

"Smarting from her recently cancelled wedding and about to turn forty, Laurie Sassalyn returns to her Maine hometown of Calcasset to handle the estate of her great-aunt Dot, a spirited adventurer who lived to be ninety. Along with boxes of Polaroids and pottery, a mysterious wooden duck shows up at the bottom of a cedar chest. Laurie's curiosity is piqued, especially after she finds a love letter to the never-married Dot that ends with the line, "And...

Frustrated with her life in the trailer park, Etta Mae Wiggins dreams of something better, but her ambition to marry a wealthy elderly man is challenged by the man's scheming children, her ex's underworld enemies, and her former flame Bobby Lee.

Few things are as lasting as the bond between sisters. In her poignant debut, Elizabeth Bass explores the lengths one cobbled-together family will go to for each other, and the power of a connection that never fades. Sassy Spinster Farm is a place to find solace. At least, that's what it's become since Rue Anderson and her sister Laura transformed their childhood Texas homestead into a successful tourist destination. It's where guests flock to get...

A tangled malpractice suit in the wake of an operating room disaster shatters the career and carefully constructed identity of anesthesiologist Marie Heaton, who also struggles with her recently blind father's increasing dependence.

Betty Weissman loses her elegant New York apartment when her husband of nearly fifty years divorces her for what he says are irreconcilable differences, but is inactuality another woman. She and her two grown daughters who quite unexpectedly find themselves the middle-aged products of a broken home and whose own lives are in varying states of disrepair and confusion regroup in a small, run-down Westport, Connecticut, beach cottage. As they wrestle...

"Tomorrow we would dock in Victoria on the northwest coast of North America, about as far away from my home as I could imagine. Like pebbles tossed upon the beach, we would scatter, trying to make our way as best we could. Most of us would marry, some would not. All of us hoped for a better life than we could ever have found in England. England, 1862. Charlotte is somewhat of a wallflower. Shy and bookish, she knows her duty is to marry, but with...