Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it’s as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable: Sylvie, the family’s dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is a free-spirited artist; and Emeline patiently takes care of them all.

Robert Olen Butler, author of Perfume River, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and A Small Hotel, teaches graduate fiction at Florida State University—his version of literary boot camp. In From Where You Dream, Butler reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual and tells writers how to achieve the dream space necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction.

A visionary and poignant novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early 20th century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South to his fledgling newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, snippets of history are brought sharply into focus.

Hatcher McCord is an evening news presenter who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He's not the only one to suffer this fate - in fact, hes surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, and almost all of the popes and most of the U.S. presidents. The question may be not who is in Hell but who isn't.

Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. This elegant and allusive novel established Molly Keane as the natural successor to Jean Rhys.

Jenna has spent the last twenty-five years trying to forget what happened to her as a teenager. Trying to forget what they did. But it has always been there - the mistake the four friends made. Now it has taken another life, Jenna has the opportunity to make amends. But if she comes forward now, the truth could shatter her marriage, her family and the friendships she's held onto all these years. And what if she's about to make the biggest mistake of all?

In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.

New Orleans, 1982. Voodoo spells, prostitutes, prisoners, and veterans who are adamant about the size of their manhood—it's all just another day at Charity Hospital, also known as The Big Free. It's a medical free-for-all with the toughest trauma surgery in America, and Elizabeth—fresh from medical school in Charleston, wearing pearls and pink plaid socks—is one of the first women to work there. Half of the doctors who start the surgery program never finish. Nothing in her proper Southern upbringing prepared Elizabeth for the gritty and gruesome world she now experiences on a daily basis.

Lenny has always known that his wife, Claire, is the love of his life. But somehow his marriage is in shambles, he’s struggling with the kids, and a string of anonymous text messages are tormenting him, insisting that Claire is a liar. Claire knows Lenny is a good man, but there’s a lot she hasn’t told him about her past. Now she’s terrified that the horrors that haunt her are about to put her entire family in danger. Strange new neighbours, insidious clients and schoolyard scandal begin to fracture Claire and Lenny’s happy families façade.

When George Abbershaw is invited to Black Dudley Manor for the weekend, he has only one thing on his mind - proposing to Meggie Oliphant. Unfortunately for George, things don't quite go according to plan. A harmless game turns decidedly deadly and suspicions of murder take precedence over matrimony. Trapped in a remote country house with a murderer, George can see no way out. But Albert Campion can.

Meghann Dontess is a woman haunted by heartbreak. Twenty-five years ago she was forced to make a terrible choice, one that cost her everything, including the love of her sister, Claire. Now, Meghann is a hotshot divorce attorney who doesn’t believe in intimacy - until she meets the one man who can change her mind.

Nora Holliday is not that kind of woman. Not the kind who has an illicit affair with a married man. But Josh Landon is everything Nora’s alcoholic husband isn’t. And now she and Josh are so infatuated, they can’t stay away from one another. Abby Landon, Josh’s daughter, is home from college nursing a broken heart. She’s seeking solace, not more scandal, so when she catches her dad kissing Nora, she vows to take the homewrecker down.

Dorothea Benton Frank is a treasure of American letters with numerous New York Times best-sellers to her credit and a portfolio full of critical acclaim. “Mixing high drama and high jinks” ( Booklist), her third Lowcountry novel follows the fortunes of the dysfunctional Abbot family. Looking to set her life aright, Anna Lutz Abbot returns to her South Carolina lowcountry hometown. And as she attempts to right past wrongs, Anna receives help and support from a quirky cast of lovable locals sure to endear themselves to listeners.

This is the story of Kitty Fane, the adulterous wife of a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. When her husband discovers her deception, he exacts a terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic in China.

In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.

Dr. Olivia Simon is on duty in the emergency room of North Carolina's Outer Banks Hospital when a gunshot victim is brought in. Midway through the desperate effort to save the young woman's life, Olivia realizes who she is - Annie O'Neill, the woman Olivia's husband, Paul, is in love with.

Twenty-one years after they were driven apart by circumstances beyond their control, two former lovers have a chance encounter on a Manhattan street. What follows is a tense, suspenseful exploration of the many facets of enduring love. Told from alternating points of view through time, If I Forget You tells the story of Henry Gold, a poet whose rise from poverty embodies the American dream, and Margot Fuller, the daughter of a prominent, wealthy family, and their unlikely, star-crossed love affair.

For Julie Holt, travelling to the beautiful but ravaged coast of Biloxi, Mississippi, is a journey into a secret past, and a life she never expected.... Julie first knew loss at the age of 12, when her sister disappeared, never to be found. As her once close-knit family grew apart, Julie's mother obsessively searched for the girl, and when her mother died, Julie took up the search, never letting go of the hope. Then, at an art exhibition in New York, she meets Monica....

In Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation.

It’s been six years since Pen Calloway watched her best friends walk out of her life. And through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them. Pen, Cat, and Will met on their first day of college and formed what seemed like a magical and lifelong bond, only to see their friendship break apart amid the realities of adulthood. When, after years of silence, Cat - the bewitching, charismatic center of their group - e-mails Pen and Will with an urgent request to meet at their college reunion, they can’t refuse.

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way. Another Country is a work that is as powerful today as it was 40 years ago - and expertly narrated by Dion Graham.

Jo, the firstborn, The General to her 11 sisters, is the only thing the Hamilton girls have in place of a mother. She is the one who taught them how to dance, the one who gives the signal each night, as they slip out of their father's townhouse and into cabs that will take them to the speakeasy. Together they elude their controlling father. Meanwhile, they continue to dance, until one night when they are caught in a raid, separated, and Jo is thrust face-to-face with someone from her past: a bootlegger named Tom whom she hasn't seen in almost 10 years.

On the day her daughter leaves for college, Anne Colwater's husband of 20 years announces he wants a divorce. Her roles of wife and mother suddenly gone, Annie retreats to her childhood home of Mystic, Washington, to heal. There she finds her old friend Nick, suddenly widowed and unable to cope with his emotionally scarred young daughter, Izzie.

The three Beauchamp women—Joanna and her daughters Freya and Ingrid—live in North Hampton, out on the tip of Long Island. Their beautiful, mist-shrouded town seems almost stuck in time, and all three women lead seemingly quiet, uneventful existences. But they are harboring a mighty secret—they are powerful witches banned from using their magic. Joanna can resurrect people from the dead and heal the most serious of injuries....

From the London pop scene, to the opera stages of Europe; from a tiny Greek island, to a stifling manor house full of secrets and deceptions; from the sun-drenched Queensland coast, to the silent outback; Angela and Ellie are two women both looking for something. One in search of her identity and her memory; the other in search of the love that she had and lost; theirs is a duet whose last note will not be sung until the heart-stopping climax, when a shadow from the past returns to claim them both.

Kentucky was only ever going to be a summer job. Come fall, Blue Riley would be back in North Carolina, in college. But one job led to another, one town led to another, and one woman led to another. Now, after twenty years Blue faces the hardest question of all - is it time to go home?

Milo Andret is born with an unusual mind. A lonely child growing up in the woods of Northern Michigan in the 1950s, he gives little thought to his own talent. But with his acceptance at UC Berkeley, he realizes the extent - and the risks - of his singular gifts. California in the '70s is a seduction, opening Milo's eyes to the allure of both ambition and indulgence. The research he begins there will make him a legend; the woman he meets there - and the rival he meets alongside her - will haunt him for the rest of his life.

The Van Ripper women have been the talk of Tarrytown, New York, for centuries. Some say they're angels; some say they're crooks. In their tumbledown "Stitchery", not far from the stomping grounds of the legendary Headless Horseman, the Van Ripper sisters - Aubrey, Bitty, and Meggie - are said to knit people's most ardent wishes into beautiful scarves and mittens, granting them health, success, or even a blossoming romance. But for the magic to work, sacrifices must be made - and no one knows that better than the Van Rippers.

Twenty years ago Emma Michaels, Mackenzie Hayes, and Serena Stockton bonded over their New York City dreams. Then, each summer, they solidified their friendship by spending one week at the lake together, solving their problems over bottles of wine and gallons of ice cream. They kept the tradition for years, until jealousy, lies, and life's disappointments made them drift apart. It's been five years since Emma has seen her friends, an absence designed to keep them from discovering a long-ago betrayal. Now she's in desperate need of their support.