"[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...

"Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying...

Gathering on Nantucket for a wedding planned to the letter by the bride's late mother, the Carmichaels and the Grahams hide their scandal-ridden, crumbling lives from the blissfully unaware, happy couple.

Twelve-year-old Emily Parmenter, her young life marked by the disappearance of her mother and the death of a beloved brother, has withdrawn into a world of her own making on the family's faded plantation in South Carolina where her father and brothers raise the legendary Lowcountry Boykin hunting spaniels, but everything changes when troubled debutante Lulu Foxworth comes to stay, hoping to escape her struggles with alcohol and sex addiction.

Catalyzed by a nephew's thoughtless prank, a pair of brothers confront painful psychological issues surrounding the freak accident that killed their father when they were boys, a loss linked to a heartbreaking deception that shaped their personal and professional lives.

Peter Webster is a rookie paramedic when he pulls a young woman out of a car wreck that should have killed her. Sheila Arsenault haunts his thoughts, and despite his misgivings Webster is soon embroiled in an intense love affair - and in her troubled life. Eighteen years later, Sheila is long gone and Webster is raising their daughter, Rowan, alone. But Rowan is veering dangerously off course, and for the first time in their quiet existence together,...

Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves--lines from...

As a boy, Will Klein had a hero: his older brother, Ken. Then, on a warm suburban night in the Kleins' affluent New Jersey neighborhood, a young woman--a girl Will had once loved--was found brutally murdered in her family's basement. The prime suspect: Ken Klein. With the evidence against him overwhelming, Ken simply vanished. And when his shattered family never heard from Ken again, they were sure he was gone for good.

When a short road trip turns into a crazy adventure, Ira and Maggie Moran have a chance to review their lives, renew their love, and reaffirm a marriage that has room enough for realists and dreamers.

Frank and April Wheeler become dissolutioned with their mediocre lives and decide to move to France in order to develop their true artistic sensibilities.