"Silence has always marked Lorna's family. Her father was deaf. Her mother, Marika, helped rescue children as a teenage member of the Dutch Resistance, yet later abandoned her own young son and daughter. No explanation was ever offered. Nor why she resurfaced decades afterward to invite Lorna--by then a married social worker with a baby--to visit her remote cottage on Lake Champlain. For the past eighteen years, Lorna has struggled to make taciturn,...

"Twelve-year-old Ko Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. He is a child with an unusual gift: Bo Bo can read people's emotions in their eyes. His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother. Then U Ba tells him of a great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events; of the bravery of the heart; and of Bo Bo's mother's mysterious illness. Convinced that he can heal her,...

"Twenty-one-year-old Reed is fed up. Angry about the killing of a Black man by an Asian American NYPD officer, he wants to drop out of college and devote himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. But would that truly bring him closer to the moral life he seeks? In a series of intimate, charged conversations, his mother—once the leader of a Korean-Black coalition—demands that he rethink his outrage, and along with it, what it means to be an organizer,...

"Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, fastidious Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul--determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is inevitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp by entering into relationships with other women. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers (1913) is a highly autobiographical...

"Stefan was just seventeen with he went to prison for the drug-fueled murder of his girlfriend, Belinda. Three years later, he's released to a world that refuses to let him move on. Meanwhile Thea Demetriou struggles to understand her son. At times, he is still the sweet boy he has always been; at other, he is a young man tormented by guilt and almost broken by his time in prison. But as his efforts to amends meet escalating resistance and threats,...

A mother's words help a little boy imagine the sights and sounds of the seashore, even though he's never seen the ocean.

Although Mother Bear urges Alfie to be patient and sleep, he cannot wait to see tiny butterflies on the wing and hear baby birds chirp in the trees.

"Our narrator, Francisco Goldberg, an American writer, has been living and working in Mexico City as a journalist for over a decade, but has recently returned to New York City in hopes of 'going home again.' It's been five years since the end of his last relationship and he is falling in love again with a new woman. Soon, though, he is beckoned back to Boston by his former high school girlfriend who was witness to his greatest youthful humiliations,...

Three friends struggle to resolve their lives in a complicated time warp called lost youth.

"Harlow Smith thought she had finally achieved the quiet life she wanted-a little bookstore on Cape Cod, an apartment in her grandpa's house, a more or less happily single life-when the biggest secret from her past walked into town and changed everything. A kid walks into your bookstore and says to you, Guess what? I'm your son. The one you put up for adoption seventeen years ago. The one you never told anyone about. Surprise! His name is Matthew...