This book is a richly woven story that traces the bonds between four generations of Southern women through stories passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter. The author shows us shrewd, resourceful women prevailing over hard times and heartless men and finding unexpected pleasures along the way: gossip, gambling, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing more than they're supposed to.

"This is how a family keeps a secret ... and how that secret ends up keeping them. This is how a family lives happily ever after ... until happily ever after becomes complicated. This is how children change ... and then change the world. When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect. But Claude is not like...

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

A “wildly entertaining” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel about a young marriage unraveling under the pressure of a subprime mortgage and ruthless Hollywood economics—from the New York Times bestselling author of Watch Me Disappear
 
“Part social satire, part melodrama, part intimate domestic portrait . . . Brown has an uncanny eye for contemporary characters and settings.”—Los...

"Celestial Bodies is set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex...

Alice Howland -- Harvard professor, gifted researcher, and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children -- sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. She has taken the route for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Medical consults reveal early-onset Alzheimer's. Alice slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, as told from her perspective. She gradually loses the ability...

The Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families, falls on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War.

A story about the fairy-tale fantasies of girlhood and the realities of growing up by “one of our quirkiest and most interesting novelists” (Jane Smiley, USA Today).
When Teresa sleeps—sometimes for days at a time, the scent of roses surrounding her—she dreams of the Arias, outlaw riders on white steeds, who roam the desert at night. She was told about the dark-eyed horsemen by her mother, Dina, who left...

JP, one of seven living children, contemplates his mother's influence on the family and his life, as he struggles with her disappointment in him and suspects she may have sabotaged a budding relationship.

"In a North Carolina mountain town filled with moonshine and rotten husbands, Sadie Blue is only the latest girl to face a dead-end future at the mercy of a dangerous drunk. She's been married to Roy Tupkin for fifteen days, and she knows now that she should have listened to the folks who said he was trouble. But when a stranger sweeps in and knocks the world off-kilter for everyone in town, Sadie begins to think there might be more to life than being...