In a remote sea-swept parish in Cornwall, high-spirited young Elfride is the sheltered daughter of the Rector. She has little experience of the world until two men tear her life apart: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals and Elfride faces an agonizing choice.

Possessing an unsettling ability to predict random future events, Anchorage resident David Winkler foresees his infant daughter's drowning death and travels thousands of miles to Ohio and the Caribbean to prevent the tragedy.

In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.

A sociologist explores the ways people leave one thing and move on to the next; how they anticipate, define, and reflect on departures; and epiphanies that something is over.

In the years before the Nazis arrive, two young people growing up in Danish Jutland have dreams of leaving their frigid coastal town while coping with distant parents, eccentric family members, and the cold winds. In the aftermath of their grandfather's suicide, the arrival of puberty and most tragically, the German invasion, their idyllic childhood changes forever.

Growing up motherless and under the thumb of a cruel stepfather in hardscrabble 1920s Kentucky, Bertie Fisher and her older sister, Mabel, are torn apart by a painful misunderstanding that reverberates through the lives of their daughters and granddaughters.

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...

"A nonfiction picture book that introduces very young children to the concept of separation and divorce in a reassuring and straightforward way."--