"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 every aspect...

"For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice's old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries...

"Courtney ~ The Misfit ~ As the awkward one, Courtney Watson may not be as together as her sisters, but she excels at one thing—keeping secrets, including her white-hot affair with a sexy music producer. Planning Mom's wedding exposes her startling hidden life, changing her family's view of her—and how she views herself—forever. Sienna ~ The Free Spirit ~ When Sienna's boyfriend proposes—in front of her mom and sisters, for crying out loud—he...

Lorca spends her life poring over cookbooks, making croissants and chocolat chaud, seeking out rare ingredients, all to earn the love of her distracted chef of a mother, who is now packing her off to boarding school. In one last effort to prove herself indispensable, Lorca resolves to track down the recipe for her mother's ideal meal, an obscure Middle Eastern dish called masgouf. Victoria, grappling with her husband's death, has been dreaming of...

Ginny Young is on a plane, en route to see her mother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for thirty-five years. She thinks back to the summer of 1958, when she and her sister, Sharla, were young girls. Moving back and forth in time between the girl she once was and the woman she's become, Ginny at last confronts painful choices that occur in almost any woman's life, and learns surprising truths about the people she thought she knew best.

Meg Rosenthal is driving toward the next chapter in her life, winding along wooded roadway not unlike those in the bedtime stories Meg used to read to her daughter, Sally. But the girl riding beside Meg is a teenager now, and a chasm has opened between them since the unexpected death of Meg's husband. They're headed for a fresh start in Arcadia Falls, a tucked-away hamlet in upstate New York where Meg has accepted a teaching position at a boarding...

"A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family, about a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for--and everything she feared. Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting, supportive mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood's exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter--Violet...

Struggling to come to terms with a grave medical diagnosis, Heather Nelson is determined to forego traditional medicine -- to her father's chagrin -- in hopes of finding answers and healing in Amish country. But first, she offers to drive her Amish friend, Grace Byler, to Ohio in order to find Grace's mother. Will mother and daughter, and one seriously ill graduate student, find the answers they long for? Or will "the telling" cause them all further...

A fierce debut novel about mothers and daughters, haves and have-nots, and the stark realities behind the American Dream. A waitress at the Betsy Ross Diner, Elsie hopes her nickel-and-dime tips will add up to a new life. Then she meets Bashkim, who is at once both worldly and naive, a married man who left Albania to chase his dreams--and wound up working as a line cook in Waterbury, Connecticut. Back when the brass mills were still open, this bustling...

Every day, Paige Redwine is haunted by a choice she made when she was only seventeen. Now, just past forty, still single, she lives a tidy, controlled life as a well-respected English professor at a college in Nashville. Nothing could prepare her for the day Treha Langsam - the daughter she secretly placed for adoption - walks into her classroom as a student, unknowingly confronting Paige with both her greatest longing and her greatest fear. As Treha...