In nineteenth century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, or "old same," in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The two women exchange messages written on silk fans and handkerchieves using nu shu, a unique language that women created in order to communicate in secret, sharing their experiences, but when a misunderstanding arises, their friendship threatens to tear apart....

Avoiding the lifestyle of his late gangster father by working as a clock repairman, Joe Spork fixes an unusual device that turns out to be a former secret agent's doomsday machine and incurs the wrath of the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator.

When 80-year-old Mrs. Shimfessle falls out of a fig tree in her front yard one morning, what follows is a series of extraordinary events that gives a comic turn to the age old question: What happens to us after we die? It's a hilarious novel about a woman's peculiar experience in the afterlife.

A powerful and beautiful novella of one woman, consigned to a dreary retirement home, who wages a defiant battle against the dulling forces around her After seventy-six-year-old Caro Spencer suffers a heart attack, her family sends her to a private retirement home to wait out the rest of her days. Her memory growing fuzzy, Caro decides to keep a journal to document the daily goings-on-her feelings of confinement and boredom; her distrust of the home's...

""The Dollhouse. That's what we boys like to call it. The Barbizon Hotel for Women, packed to the rafters with pretty little dolls. Just like you." Fiona Davis's stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City's glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side-by-side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success in the 1950s, and where a present-day journalist...

Seventy-year-old Margaret Hughes is tired of living alone in her Seattle mansion, so she welcomes Wanda Schultz, a young woman suffering a broken heart, into her home, and the two form an unlikely friendship.

Ruth Ritchie elopes with a stereo salesman, thinking that she has found her ticket out of Summerville, Tennessee where her future means selling pies at Durwood's Hardware. But Chuck "gets religion," and Ruth, who cherishes her freedom more than safety, buys a used car and heads north. When Ruth faints from hunger at a North Carolina five-and-dime, Rose, a feisty elderly reporter, rescues her. A friendship stronger than family ties blossoms; for all...

"Nonna Maria sets out to clear her goddaughter's name and uncover the checkered past of an unidentifiable victim in this transporting mystery"--

"From New York Times and internationally bestselling author Isabel Allende, an exquisitely crafted love story and multigenerational epic that sweeps from San Francisco in the present-day to Poland and the United States during the Second World War. In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco's parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of...

"Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Gaskell's best known work is set in a small rural town, inhabited largely by women. This is a community that runs on cooperation and gossip, at the very heart of which are the daughters of the former rector:...