"[S]hows 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...

Spirit Traffic recounts how, at the age of 50, the author learned to ride a motorcycle, overcame the terror of navigating her steep dirt Vermont driveway, and set off three days after her son's graduation, with him and her yoga-teacher husband (his stepdad) on a 10,000 mile adventure. As if in the saddle of her BMW, the reader will experience the elation and the trials of her journey as a soon-to-be-empty-nester grappling with impermanence, sexuality,...

The year is 1910, and two Antarctic explorers, Watts and Heywoud, are racing to the South Pole. Back in London, Viola, a photo-journalist, harbors love for them both. In Terra Nova, Henriette Lazaridis seamlessly ushers the reader back and forth between the austere, forbidding, yet intoxicating polar landscape of Antarctica to the bustle of early twentieth century London. Though anxious for both men, Viola has little time to pine. She is photographing...