"When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days, decades years earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she'd been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? Astrid's youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give...

Carrie Hanwell is a female firefighter in Texas, and she's a total pro at handling other people's emergencies. But when her ailing mother asks her move to Boston, Cassie suddenly has an emergency of her own. She finds a job at a tough, old-school Boston firehouse, but firemen aren't exactly thrilled to have a "lady" on the crew--except for the infatuation-inspiring rookie. But she can't think about that, because love is girly, and it's not her thing....

"The Frosts are a typical American family. Barb and John, married almost fifty years, are testy and bored with each other . . . who could blame them after all this time? At least they have their daughters -- Barb's favorite, the perfect, brilliant Juliet; and John's darling, the free-spirited Sadie. The girls themselves couldn't be more different, but at least they got along, more or less. It was fine. It was enough. Until the day John had a stroke,...

"From star-crossed matches to unexpected love triangles, summer on Nantucket always holds the promise of romance in this sensational novel from New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer. Lisa Hudson feels more alive than she has in a long time after hiring hunky carpenter Mack Whitney to renovate her old Nantucket home. There's no denying the spark growing between them--despite the fact that Mack is ten years her junior. But her twentysomething...

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, "Scout", returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming becomes bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her.

"Sink or swim. Or at least that's what Annette Feldman tells herself when she books a cruise for her entire family. It's been over a decade since the Feldman clan has spent more than twenty-four hours under the same roof, but Annette is determined to celebrate her seventieth birthday the right way. Just this once, they are going to behave like an actual family. Too bad her kids didn't get the memo. Between the troublesome family secrets, old sibling...

"A lucid and moving debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time. How do we take stock of a life--by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental,...

"In an effort to forestall the frailty and isolation of old age, psychiatrist Millard Salter intends to kill himself at the end of the day-but not before he ties up his life's loose ends. These include a with his ne'er-do-well youngest son, Lysander, who at 43 has yet to hold down a paying job; an unscheduled rendezvous with his first wife, Carol, whom he hasn't seen in 27 years; and a brief visit to the grave of his second wife, Isabelle, with whom...