Living on opposite coasts and preparing to see their children depart for school, two women, the wives of frequently traveling husbands, are shattered by a devastating secret that brings them together and tests their beliefs about forgiveness.

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family's struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings....

"On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attentions, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. But her gift is no blessing, for her mother - her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother - tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food...

"From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Moor's Account--a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a...

In this novel a high-powered Manhattan attorney finds love, purpose, and the promise of a simpler life in her grandmother's hometown. Ellen Branford is going to fulfill her grandmother's dying wish, to find the hometown boy she once loved, and give him her last letter. Ellen leaves Manhattan and her Kennedy-esque fiancé for Beacon, Maine. What should be a one-day trip is quickly complicated when she almost drowns in the chilly bay and is saved by...

Kelly Rich, long estranged from her family, is forced to return home when her sister is involved in a mysterious accident. After years of suppressing the events that drove her away she must struggle to unlock the mystery of her past in order to save her sister. But nothing is as it seems in the foreboding Spires, her ancestral home, where cold hearts rule the hearth and deadly secrets lurk in the forest. Plunged back into the dreamworld of her youth...

"With no memory of her birth parents, or the tragic accident that took their lives, Lydia Beachy has always been grateful for the aunt and uncle who took her in and raised her as their own. Now a married woman with two sons, Lydia finds her life turned upside down when she discovers that she has two younger sisters: Susanna, who was adopted by an Amish family in another community, and Chloe, who was raised by their grandmother among the Englisch"--Page...

"The acclaimed, bestselling author--winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize--tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families' lives. One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining...

"In the vein of Richard Russo and Tom Perrotta, a gripping, suspenseful, and gorgeous debut novel -- told hour-by-hour over the course of a single day -- in which a husband and wife try to outrun long-buried secrets, sending their lives spiraling into chaos"--

Traces the evolving bond of love and secrets between a woman and her brother, a relationship marked by family ties in Europe and America, a secretive friend, and historical events from more than three decades.