"1996. Essex. Thirteen-year-old schoolgirl Carly lives in a disenfranchised town dominated by a military base, struggling to care for her baby sister while her mum sleeps off another binge. When her squaddie brother brings food and treats, and offers an exclusive invitation to army parties, things start to look a little less bleak... 2006. London. Junior TV newsroom journalist Marie has spent six months exposing a gang of sex traffickers, but everything...

A train roars over the rails, carrying passengers on a trip that will change their lives. Among the many people aboard the 97 Silver Meteor are Andie Crystal, a lonely young woman hiding from her youth as a reality TV star; Matthew Scofield, a widower trying to balance his career and his responsibilities for his two young children; and Janette Turlington, a middle-aged mother running from a troubled home and marriage. These three form a makeshift...

When Lucinda Barrett's husband destroys their marriage in a shocking betrayal, she's left with nothing but the shattered remnants of her life-- and her novel. Desperate to keep one last dream alive, she sets out on a 1,000 mile journey to get it into the hands of readers-- one bookstore at a time. Ruth Hardaway knows all about shattered dreams. For the last 30 years she's devoted her life to her store, The Book Lover, trying to bury her painful past....

Dinah Spencer is back in her childhood home for one stressful weekend. It's the twenty-five-year anniversary of her father's marriage to her stepmother. Those twenty-five years haven't all been happy ones for middle child Dinah, but she's getting ready to put the past behind her, keeping the bonds of family strong for her own daughter Josie's sake--until her beloved dad collapses in the middle of his anniversary speech. In the wake of her father's...

Shy Lizzie Martin lives a quiet life teaching music and helping her family run their bed and breakfast, but she longs to record her own songs and meet a handsome man. Asher Hill is wheelchair-bound after an accident, but makes hearts throb over the radio.

"Clement and Angel are fraternal twins separated at birth; they grow up in the same small, frontier logging town of Stillwater, Minnesota. Clement was left at the orphanage; Angel was adopted by the town's richest couple, but is marked and threatened by her mother's mental illness. They rarely meet, but Clement knows if he is truly in need, Angel will come to save him. Stillwater, near the Mississippi River and Canada, becomes an important stop on...

Few writers can enter their characters so completely or evoke their lives as viscerally as Andre Dubus III. In this deeply compelling new novel, a father, estranged for the worst of reasons, is driven to seek out the daughter he has not seen in decades. Daniel Ahearn lives a quiet, solitary existence in a seaside New England town. Forty years ago, following a shocking act of impulsive violence on his part, his daughter, Susan, was ripped from his...

Artfully juxtaposing two contrasting personalities (as he did in Inspired Sleep), Cohen explores the terrain of male middle age in a novel that keenly observes the dissatisfactions of contemporary life. Teddy Hastings, the 53-year-old principal of a New England middle school, yearns for a grand adventure that would celebrate his manhood. Restless and impulsive, Teddy unwittingly causes a scandal that lands him briefly in jail. Disgraced and forced...

Joette Harper's life brings new meaning to the phrase "paycheck to paycheck." Struggling to afford her mother's sky-high medical bills and also keep the lights on in her trailer home, Joette needs a break. So, when she spies a bag full of money amongst the wreckage of a fiery car accident, she knows she can't just let it be. Inside is a bounty better than she could have dreamed--just shy of $300,000 in neatly stacked hundreds and fifties. Enough to...