Annie Adams is days away from her thirty-second birthday and thinks she has finally found some happiness. She visits the world's most interesting places for her syndicated travel column and she's happily cohabiting with her movie director boyfriend Nick in Los Angeles. But when Nick comes home from a meeting with his therapist (aka "futures counselor") and announces that he's taking a break from their relationship so he can pursue a woman from his...

A collection of short fiction explores the complexities of human relationships and emotions in stories about a housekeeper entering old-maidhood whose life is transformed by a practical joke and a lifelong philanderer who finds the tables turned. "A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into the special place known as Alice Munro territory--a place where an unexpected twist of events or...

"Vienna, 1954: After losing everyone she loves in the final days of World War II, Ingrid Bauer agrees to a hasty marriage with a gentle Soviet embassy worker and follows him home to Moscow. But nothing within the Soviet Union's totalitarian regime is what it seems, including her new husband, whom Ingrid suspects works for the KGB. Inspired by her daughter's birth, Ingrid risks everything and reaches out in hope to the one country she understands and...

Eva is excited for a visit from her sister Alice, who lives in Suffolk with her husband and three children. But when Alice arrives alone, desiring a break from her family, Eva becomes concerned. Her dismay deepens as Alice starts spending time with a former beau, Keenan Ripley, who owns the nearby pear orchard. At the same time, Phoebe's sister Julia, now a widow and pregnant, is in a fretful state, and Phoebe struggles to be helpful to her. When...

"Business becomes personal for the Right Sort Marriage Bureau when a new client, a brutal murder, two kidnappings, and the recently returned from Africa Lord Bainbridge threatens everything that one of the principals holds dear ..."-- London, 1946. The Right Sort Marriage Bureau is getting on its feet and expanding. Miss Iris Sparks and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge are making a go of it. That is until Lord Bainbridge, the widowed Gwen's father-in-law...

"Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily--fiercely...

"The #1 New York Times bestselling author and "king of Christmas fiction" (The New York Times) delivers a charming and inspirational collection of personal essays.Before he was the #1 New York Times bestselling author of holiday classics such as The Christmas Box, Richard Paul Evans was a young boy being raised by a suicidal mother and dealing with relentless bullying. He could not fathom what the future held for him. Now, in this intimate and heartfelt...

A novella and short stories. The novella is on a homely woman who throughout her youth and marriage suffers from an ugliness complex. One day she falls in love with a blind musician and is cured.

The story of the amoral beauty Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to climb the social ladder, and her sentimental companion Amelia, who falls for a caddish soldier, presents a panoramic satire of Regency society.

"Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has a word for everything, and big dreams of being a writer but little hope of seeing them come true. With the fresh pain of her mother's death lingering over her and the only out from her impoverished life being marriage to the handsome but dull local rich boy, Maddie flees from her home. She takes a job at the Glenmore, where hotel guest Grace Brown entrusts her with the task of burning a secret bundle of letters....