In 1956, as a minister approaches the end of his life, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.

"Quinn Maybrook just wants to make it to graduation. She might not make it to morning. When Quinn and her father move to a tiny town with a weird clown for a mascot, they're looking for a fresh start. But ever since the town's only factory shut down, Kettle Springs has been cracked in half. Most of the town believes that the kids are to blame. After all, the juniors and seniors at Kettle Springs High are the ones who threw the party where Arthur...

Marilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowa--the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack--and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson's fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead's Presbyterian minister, and his...

Olympia Crawford Rubinstein has a busy legal career, a solid marriage, and a way of managing her thriving family with grace, humor, and boundless energy. With twin daughters finishing high school, a son at Dartmouth, and a kindergartner from her second marriage, there seems to be no challenge to which Olympia cannot rise. Until one sunny day in May, when she opens an invitation for her daughters to attend the most exclusive coming-out ball in New...

The Mill on the Floss tells the story of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a pair of siblings who grow up together on a river in early nineteenth century England. While Tom's reserved nature and Maggie's idealism produce differences that strain their love in times of hardship, the two ultimately reconcile when confronted with certain death. A powerful work on individual tenacity in the face of oppressive circumstance, The Mill on the Floss remains one of Eliot's...

In Mildred Pierce, noir master James M. Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devasting emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.
Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses:...

Sink or swim. Or at least that's what Annette Feldman tells herself when she books a cruise for her entire family. It's been over a decade since the Feldman clan has spent more than twenty-four hours under the same roof, but Annette is determined to celebrate her seventieth birthday the right way. Just this once, they are going to behave like an actual family. Too bad her kids didn't get the memo. Between the troublesome family secrets, old sibling...

"Lonnie grows up caught in the middle of his beloved grandfather Homer Bannon, an old-time cattleman dedicated to the values of honesty and decency, and Hud, Homer's unscrupulous stepson." *** "When Larry McMurtry's classic novel of the post-World War II era was originally published in 1961, it created a ssensation in Texas literary circles. Never before had a writer portrayed the contemporary West in conflict in such stark, realistic, unsentimental...

The Cohens are wildly impractical intellectuals--academics, activists, and artists. The Barlows are Wall Street Journal -reading lawyers steeped in trusts and copyrights, golf and tennis. The two families are reserved with and wary of each other, but tonight, the evening before the wedding that is supposed to unite them in marriage, they will attempt to set aside their differences over dinner in the garden. As Celia Cohen, the eminent literary critic,...