Read-Alikes for French Braid

"A retired widow in rural Connecticut wakes to an unexpected visit from her childhood best friend whom she hasn't seen in forty-nine years. An older man who has traveled from Manhattan to meet his newborn granddaughter collapses in a hotel lobby in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A sixty-seven-year-old taxi driver in Kauai receives a phone call from the mainland that jars her back to a traumatic past. Seemingly disconnected lives come together as half-century...

A rich, many-layered novel from one of our major writers, her first in nine years.

Set in the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, it is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us.

At its center: Lark and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but full of radiance; their mother, Lola; their aunt,...

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family -- their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog -- is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and...