Mona Ellison's life is as perfect as the porcelain dolls lined up on her shelves. She has a successful husband, a loving son, a beautiful home, and a supportive group of girlfriends ever ready for their weekly wine night. But when Mona's son gets entangled with the wrong crowd and runs away from home, her blissful suburban world begins to unravel. She tells her friends that boys will be boys, that he'll be back as soon as his money runs dry . . ....

Claudia Morgan is a single parent trying the best that she can, but her four-year-old son, Henry, is a handful. When Claudia hears about a school with an atypical teaching style, she has to visit. The Hawthorne School is good for Henry. But there's something a bit off about the school. When Henry brings home stories of ceremonies in the woods and odd rules, Claudia's instincts tell her that something isn't quite right, and she begins to realize she's...

"From the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard University's library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade,...

A family saga reflecting the troubled state of India. The protagonists are four generations of the da Gama, who became wealthy in the spice trade before declining into gangsterism. Their tale is narrated by the family's last descendant and he attributes their fall to bickering, a reflection of Hindu-Moslem strife plaguing India today. Peopled with odd characters--the narrator is the product of a Jewish father and a Christian mother--the novel is a...

Ruth is a young orphaned girl who works in a sweatshop. Mrs. Mason, Ruth's boss, runs the sweatshop in a respectable manner, earning a sterling reputation among her employees and society. However, the comfort and acclaim of Ruth's job is threatened when she attends a ball to repair any dresses that get torn during dancing. There, she meets an aristocratic man named Henry Bellingham, who is infamous for his immoral treatment of women and frivolous...

A novel about the difference between going home and finding yourself there. What is the price of regret? Is love ever wrong? What does it mean to forgive? When the distant mother he hasn't seen in ten years desperately calls him home, struggling actor Wally Day finds his carefully constructed world falling in on itself. Now he must confront the reasons he left his hometown in a cloud of anger, shame, and guilt, he must look face-to-face upon the ghosts...

In return for a "free" car--and a way out of her small hometown--Lo Gunderson must track down Blanche Peterson's estranged son. But first, she needs to get the car started

Tobias Wolff's first two books proved how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation” (New York Times Book Review). Now after writing numerous other works, he returns to the short story with fresh revelations—about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains...

"Sonya used to perform on stage. She used to attend glamorous parties, date handsome men, ride in fast cars. But somewhere along the way, the stage lights Sonya lived for dimmed for good. And then, in their absence, came darkness--blackouts, empty cupboards, hazy nights she can't remember. Haunted by her failed career and unresolved childhood trauma, Sonya has fallen deep into an alcoholic abyss. What keeps Sonya from losing herself completely is...

Using her skills as a handwriting analyst to assist a local murder and kidnapping investigation, Anna identifies disturbing parallels between the crimes and her own struggles to protect her troubled teen son from her abusive ex.