Future interior designer Maggie, a sixth-grader, focuses on an upcoming design contest to cope with friendship and family troubles, including having Tony, a half-brother she never knew existed, move in.

"When Eleanor Hardwicke's beloved father dies, her world is further shattered by a gut-wrenching secret: the man she's grieving isn't really her dad. Eleanor was the product of an affair and her biological father is still out there, living blissfully with the family he chose. With her personal life spiraling, a desperate Eleanor seeks him out, leading her to uncover another branch on her family tree--an infuriatingly enviable half sister. Perfectly...

"Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller's injured leg and the danger of Tie's imminent labor, food and water dwindling while the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from...

Che Milan's life is falling apart. Not only has her longtime lover abruptly dumped her, but her eccentric, demanding mother has recently died. When an urn of ashes arrives, along with a note reminding Che of a half-forgotten promise to take her mother to Canterbury, Che finds herself reluctantly undertaking a pilgrimage. Within days she joins a group of women who are walking the sixty miles from London to the shrine of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral....

In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, gather to play mah jong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. United in unspeakable loss and new hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, memories that reveal these women's strength, worries, and determination, which their American-born daughters reject as irrelevant. The daughters, in turn,...

"It wasn't easy for Yvonne Cable to get over a heartbreaking relationship and revamp her life. But now the once-broke single mom is Atlanta's most sought-after interior designer--and one-half of the media's hottest power couple. She and her celebrity fiancé, Nathan, are a perfect, practical match, on--and off--camera. And with their new home improvement reality show the object of a fierce network bidding war, there's no limit to how far they can...

"June, 1584. On hearing news of the sudden death of her stepfather, Sir Walter Pendennis, Rosamond Jaffrey must leave London for Cornwall to look after the interests of her young half-brother and try to mend her strained relationship with their mother. However, on arriving in Cornwall, Rosamond makes the shocking discovery that Sir Walter was in fact murdered, and reluctantly she agrees to work with an agent of the queen's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham,...

1945: When the critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought to a private hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side, young Dr. Kate Schuyler is drawn into a complex mystery that connects three generations of women in her family to a single extraordinary room in a Gilded Age mansion. Who is the woman in Captain Ravenel's portrait miniature who looks so much like Kate? And why is she wearing the ruby pendant handed down to Kate by her mother?...

A hard-hitting reporter, Kate Beaumont unearths the deepest lies and brings harsh truths to light. But the story that lures her to the gentle town of Laurel Ridge, Pennsylvania, is closer to her heart than anyone knows. The details of her half brother's sudden death have never made sense. She owes him justice, yet the one man who can help her is the stubborn sheriff she can't stand. Protecting his town is Mac Whiting's top priority. Everything else...

"The Carson dynasty rules the ski resort town of Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Founded by patriarch Adam, the town is the site of the Mammoth Cup ski race-a qualifier for the Olympics. But when Wylie Welborn, Adam's illegitimate grandson, returns after a stint in Afghanistan, it reopens a dark moment in Carson family history: the murder of Wylie's father by his jealous and very pregnant wife, Cynthia. Her son Sky, born...