It's 1962, and all across America barriers are collapsing. But when Natalie Marx's mother inquires about summer accommodations in Vermont, she gets the following reply: The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. For twelve-year-old Natalie, who has a stubborn sense of justice, the words are not a rebuff but an infuriating, irresistible challenge.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Cecily Foster loves to make podcasts. She fiercely protects her colleagues, dearly adores her friends, and never misses dinner with her sister. But after a disastrous relationship with a colleague who stole her heart and her ideas, she’s put romantic love on hold. When the boss who’s disappointed her again and again finally offers her the chance to host her own show, she wants to be thrilled. But there’s a catch—actually, two catches. First, the show will be about Cecily’s dating life.

Going Home is a sparkling, funny, bighearted story of family and what happens when three men—all of whom are completely ill-suited for fatherhood—take charge of a toddler following an unexpected loss.

She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband” and “wife” force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose. Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes.

When Kyle McCray gets word his father has suffered a debilitating stroke, he returns to his hometown of Potsdam, New York, where he doesn’t expect a warm welcome. Kyle left suddenly two and a half years ago, abandoning people who depended on him: his father, his employees, his friends—not to mention Casey, his wife of sixteen years and a beloved teacher in town. He plans to lie low and help his dad recuperate until he can leave again, especially after Casey makes it clear she wants him gone.

A year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. Three days after her first visit to a psychiatrist, Jane suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

Lila De is on the verge of a career breakthrough when she gets a call from her mother in Kolkata, informing her that she’s inherited her family’s sprawling estate–so she returns home after a decade with no contact. Her extended family isn’t so easy to win over, and to make matters worse, Lila is caught between her old boyfriend and her occasional lover–her star author–who suddenly wants to define the relationship. As Lila come to terms with both past and present, suppressed family secrets emerge, culminating in a shocking act of violence. Lila has no choice but to finally address her family.

When Ruth Handler walks into the boardroom of the toy company she co-founded and pitches her idea for a doll unlike any other, she knows what she’s setting in motion. It might just take the world a moment to catch up. In 1956, the only dolls on the market for little girls let them pretend to be mothers. Ruth’s vision for a doll shaped like a grown woman and outfitted in an enviable wardrobe will let them dream they can be anything.

On a bright spring afternoon, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes off the clothesline, she straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe—and that this time, when she leaves, she must stay away. On the surface, she has a perfect life: her husband, Ryan, is a good provider, sometimes even kind and attentive, from a nice Irish family, and they have another baby on the way.

Jane and Dan have been married for nineteen years, but Jane isn’t sure they’re going to make it to twenty. The mother of two feels unneeded by her teenagers, and her writing career has screeched to an unsuccessful halt. Her one published novel sold under five hundred copies. Worse? She’s pretty sure Dan is cheating on her. When the couple goes to the renowned upscale restaurant La Fin du Monde to celebrate their anniversary, Jane thinks it’s as good a place as any to tell Dan she wants a divorce.

Eddie Winston is 90 years old. He has lived and he has loved, but he has never been kissed. A true gentleman and incurable romantic, Eddie spends his days volunteering at a charity shop, where he sorts through the donations of the living and the dead, preserving letters and tokens of love along the way. And it is here that he meets Bella, a troubled young woman who, at 24 years old, has just lost the love of her life.

After nearly losing the election to a geriatric donkey, newly installed Mayor Delizia Miccuci can’t help but feel like the sun has finally set on the rural Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino. Tourists only stop by to ask for directions, Nonna Amara’s cherished ristorante is long shuttered, and the town hall is disgustingly overrun with glis glis poo—even Postman Duccio has been disgraced.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

In this award-winning Audible Studios production, Trevor Noah tells his wild coming-of-age tale during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa. It’s a story that begins with his mother throwing him from a moving van to save him from a potentially fatal dispute with gangsters, then follows the budding comedian’s path to self-discovery through episodes both poignant and comical.

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

Separated by 10 years, 3,000 miles, and the unrelenting stresses of adulthood, best friends Janet and Serena plan a 40th birthday girls’ trip to reconnect. But after a massive crash, they’re the only survivors to wash ashore on an uncharted Caribbean Island. Armed with only the clothes on their backs and zero survival skills, they fight to overcome hunger, thirst, deadly wildlife—and most terrifyingly—decades of accrued resentment. Can they find their way home, or will they kill each other first?

We all have things in our life that we should know by now, but don’t. Absences in our knowledge and skillset that are frankly shameful in an adult. Things that would be too embarrassing to ask anyone to explain – except our very best friend. Listen in as Mel and Sue tackle their ignorance head on, asking each other to explain something that they still don’t know - but absolutely, as adults, should - from how to parallel park to fully understanding bread (why has it got all those holes in it? What, honestly, is yeast?).

Jane Morgan is a valued member of her law firm—or was, until a prudish neighbor, binoculars poised, observes her having sex on the roof of her NYC apartment building. Police are summoned, and a punishing judge sentences her to six months of home confinement. With Jane now jobless and rootless, trapped at home, life looks bleak. Yes, her twin sister provides support and advice, but mostly of the unwelcome kind.

It's 1962, and all across America barriers are collapsing. But when Natalie Marx's mother inquires about summer accommodations in Vermont, she gets the following reply: The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. For twelve-year-old Natalie, who has a stubborn sense of justice, the words are not a rebuff but an infuriating, irresistible challenge.

At 32, Faith Frankel has returned to her claustro-suburban hometown, where she writes institutional thank-you notes for her alma mater. It's a peaceful life, really, and surely with her recent purchase of a sweet bungalow on Turpentine Lane, her life is finally on track. Never mind that her fiancé is off on a crowdfunded cross-country walk, too busy to return her texts (but not too busy to post photos of himself with a different woman in every state).

Daphne Maritch doesn't quite know what to make of the heavily annotated high school yearbook she inherits from her mother, who held this relic dear. Too dear. The late June Winter Maritch was the teacher to whom the class of '68 had dedicated its yearbook, and in turn she went on to attend every reunion, scribbling notes and observations after each one - not always charitably - and noting who overstepped boundaries of many kinds. In a fit of decluttering (the yearbook did not, Daphne concluded, "spark joy"), she discards it when she moves to a small New York City apartment.

Rachel Klein is sacked from her job at the White House after she sends an email criticizing Donald Trump. As she is escorted off the premises, she is hit by a speeding car, driven by what the press will discreetly call "a personal friend of the president". Does that explain the flowers, the get-well wishes at a press briefing, the hush money offered by a lawyer at her hospital bedside? Rachel’s recovery is soothed by comically doting parents, matchmaking roommates, a new job as aide to a journalist whose books aim to defame the president, and unexpected love at the local wine store.

Henry is a lawyer, an old-fashioned man, gay, successful, and lonely. Thalia, his stepdaughter from a misbegotten marriage, is now twenty-nine, an actress, hopeful and estranged from her newly widowed crackpot mother. Hoping it will lead to better things for her career, Thalia poses as the girlfriend of a former sitcom star and current horror-movie luminary who is down on his romantic luck. When Thalia and her complicated social life move into the basement of Henry’s Upper West Side townhouse, she finds a champion in her long-lost father, and he finds new life—and maybe even new love.

April Epner teaches high school Latin, wears flannel jumpers, and is used to having her evenings free. Bernice Graverman brandishes designer labels, favors toad-sized earrings, and hosts her own tacky TV talk show: Bernice G! But behind the glitz and glam, Bernice has followed the life of the daughter she gave up for adoption 36 years ago. Now that she's got her act together, she's aiming to be a mom like she always knew she could. And she's hurtling straight for April's quiet little life....

Massachusetts, 1970s. Born to a pair of “bleeding heart” professors who live on campus as dorm parents, Frederica Hatch soon finds herself the unofficial mascot of Dewing College. Life is so ideal that by the time she becomes a teenager, Frederica finds herself chafing under the care of the most annoyingly evenhanded parental team in the history of civilization. But she’s about to learn that life isn’t as simple or idyllic as it seems—even amid the manicured lawns of a small women’s college like Dewing.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

When Harriet Mahoney first saw it, Isabel Krug's bed was covered in sheared sheep and littered with celebrity biographies. The unpublished, fortyish, and recently jilted Harriet had fled wintry Manhattan in response to a mysterious ad in The New York Review of Books: "Book in progress? Why not share my Cape Cod retreat? Roomy and peaceful, your life will be your own."

Aspiring journalist Noa has a secret she's been keeping. Ever since her sister's tragic death, she's felt almost...relieved. Noa and Leah had been locked in competition with one another since childhood, and things came to a head when her sister scored a glitzy internship at a New York society newspaper. Noa can't help but revel in her new found autonomy.

In a quiet North Carolina town in 1968, a seventeen-year-old girl’s life is forever changed when a summer romance leads to an unplanned pregnancy. She is sent to an abusive “maternity home,” where she is shamed and deceived into signing adoption papers.

Elinor Lipman has populated her fictional universe with characters so utterly real that we feel like they're old friends. Now she shares an even more intimate world with us - her own - in essays that offer a candid, charming take on modern life. Looking back and forging ahead, she considers the subjects that matter most: childhood and condiments, long marriage and solo living, career and politics. Here you'll find the lighthearted: a celebration of four decades of All My Children, a reflection on being Jewish in heavily Irish-Catholic Lowell on St. Patrick's Day, a hilariously unflinching account of her tiptoe into online dating.

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France.

Grace Hastings’s dream job at the popular “true love” dating app, Fate, has turned into a nightmare. Her boss is a leech, her career is stagnating, and her fiancé has just brutally dumped her. Her hope for finding her own love story is waning, and she feels like a fraud for promoting a concept she no longer believes in. When the company’s CEO offers her an opportunity to earn a big promotion, she resolves to fight her imposter syndrome to show she deserves a seat at the table. The opportunity? To launch a brand-new app focusing on IRL dating and genuine connection.