When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she'd been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? Astrid's youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence....

"Sometimes you have to break a family to fix it. From the New York Times bestselling author of Life and Other Inconveniences comes a new novel of heartbreaking truths and hilarious honesty about what family really means. Barb and John Frost are testy and bored with each other after fifty years of marriage. At least they have their daughters- Barb's favorite, Juliet; and John's darling, Sadie. The girls themselves couldn't be more different, but at...

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he hands over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan, but as relations sour he starts to doubt the wisdom of past decisions. Now imprisoned in Meadowmeade, an upscale sanatorium in rural England, with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills,...

"When Fern Douglas sees the news about Astrid Sullivan, a thirty-four-year-old missing woman from Maine, she is positive that she knows her. Fern's husband is sure it's because of Astrid's famous kidnapping--and equally famous return--twenty years ago, but Fern has no memory of that, even though it happened an hour outside her New Hampshire hometown. And when Astrid appears in Fern's recurring nightmare, one in which a girl reaches out to her, pleading,...

Severely wounded in the Iraq war, Leroy Kervin has lived in a group home for eight years. Frustrated by the simplest daily routines, he finds his existence has become unbearable. An act of desperation helps him disappear deep into his mind, into a world of romance and science fiction, danger and adventure where he is whole once again. Freddie McCall, the night man at Leroy's group home, works two jobs yet still can't make ends meet. He's lost his...

A poignant, evocative story that celebrates the magic of motherhood, the joys of coming home, and the price we so willingly pay for love. Years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child have broken more than Angie DeSaria's heart. Following a painful divorce, she moves back to her small Pacific Northwest hometown and takes over management of her family's restaurant. In West End, where life rises and falls like the tides, Angie's fortunes will...

"A lucid and moving debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time. How do we take stock of a life--by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental,...