Soon after he purchases a dusty can of monster blood at the funky old toy store near his great-aunt's house, Evan begins to notice some strange things happening to the people around him.

“This exuberant comic novel—involving explosions, secret agents, religious fanatics and a hapless narrator dragged around Europe by his long-lost aunt—is also a sly theological exploration of fate and predestination.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
Calvin Bledsoe has never grown up. His mother, an internationally known theologian, was the dominant force in his life—so much so that...

"Smarting from her recently canceled wedding and about to turn forty, Laurie Sassalyn returns to her Maine hometown of Calcasset to handle the estate of her great-aunt Dot, a spirited adventurer who lived to be ninety-three. Alongside boxes of Polaroids and pottery, a mysterious wooden duck shows up at the bottom of a cedar chest. Laurie's curiosity is piqued, especially after she finds a love letter to the never-married Dot that ends with the line...

"A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great-aunt's secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage. In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed...

After moving with his mother to a trailer park to care for an injured aunt, eleven-year-old Jamie Reardon struggles to cope with a deeply buried secret.

When 28-year-old Agnes Blythe, the contented bifocals-wearing half of an academic power couple, is jilted by her professor boyfriend for the town Pilates instructor, her future is suddenly less than certain. So when her glamorous, eccentric Great Aunt Effie arrives in town and offers a job helping to salvage the condemned Stagecoach Inn, what does Agnes have to lose? But work at the inn has barely begun when the unlikely duo find the body of manipulative...

"With her divorce settlement about to run out and a mortgage she can't afford, Robyn Caldwell needs a plan. But how's she supposed to think when her daughter has become the most demanding bride ever, her son won't even consider college, her best friend is on the brink of marital disaster and her ex is making a bad decision that could bring everything crashing down on Robyn's head? When her great-aunt Lillian invites her to Santa Barbara for the summer,...

Imagine you live with your aunt, who hates you so much she's going to sell you into a dreadful apprenticeship. Imagine you run away before that can happen. Imagine that you can see ghosts -- and talk with the dead. People like you are feared, even shunned. Now imagine...the first people you encounter after your escape are a mysterious stranger and a ghost boy, who seem to need you desperately -- though you don't understand who they are or exactly...

Great-aunt Alice Rumphius was once a little girl who loved the sea, longed to visit faraway places, and wished to do something to make the world more beautiful--and she does all those things, the last being the most difficult of all.

As a child, Great-aunt Alice Rumphius resolved that when she grew up she would go to faraway places, live by the sea in her old age, and do something to make the world more beautiful; she does them all, the last being the hardest of all.