Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright...Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University,...

Sadie Montogmery has had good breaks and bad breaks in her life, but as a struggling artist, all she needs is one lucky break. Things seem to be going her way when she lands one of the coveted finalist spots in a portrait competition. It happens to coincide with a surgery she needs to have. Minor, they say. Less than a week in the hospital they say. Nothing about you will change, they say. Upon recovery, it begins to dawn on Sadie that she can see...

"Thirty-three-year-old Shea Rigsby has spent her entire life in Walker, Texas--a small college town that lives and dies by football. Raised alongside her best friend, Lucy, the daughter of Walker's head coach, Clive Carr, Shea was too devoted to her hometown team to leave. She stayed in Walker for college, even taking a job in the university athletic department. When an unexpected tragedy strikes the Walker community, Shea's world is upended, and...

Believing she is realizing her dreams when her sitcom is bought, television writer Ruth Saunders finds her happiness threatened by demanding actors and executives as well as an unrequited crush on her boss and her septuagenarian grandmother's upcoming wedding.

For generations the Millers have lived in Miller's Valley, a small American town on the verge of enormous change. Mimi Miller tells about her life, from 1960's to present, with intimacy and honesty, as though revealing it to the best friend she never had. As Mimi eavesdrops on her parents and quietly observes people around her, she discovers more and more about the toxicity of family secrets, the dangers of gossip, the flaws of marriage, the inequalities...

A funny, gripping and surprising story of a mixed-race British woman who goes in search of the African father she never knew, by award-winning author Chibundu Onuzo. Anna grew up in England with her white mother and knowing very little about her African father. In middle age, after separating from her husband and with her daughter all grown up, she finds herself alone and wondering who she really is. Her mother's death leads her to find her father's...

"One secret, one nightmare, one lie. You guess which is which. 1. I have the scar of a gunshot wound on my forehead. 2. I have willfully misrepresented my identity to the US military. 3. I'm the new mother of a seven-year-old girl. Kellen Adams suffers from a yearlong gap in her memory. A bullet to the brain will cause that. But she's discovering the truth, and what she learns changes her life, her confidence and her very self. She finds herself in...

Over committed and overwhelmed, Julie Charlton is at the breaking point. She knows she should feel blessed as a mother and wife--but she just feels exhausted. And then, the miraculous happens. Her sister-in-law Susan, a Martha Stewart-in-training, lands the chance to participate in a reality TV series about trying to live like the Amish and needs another family to join her. It's just the break Julie needs. But the summer adventure in simple...

The woman in the picture was so young she looked like a child. Her hair was loose, eyes wide, blue T-shirt stark against the pale lines of arching collarbones. I felt the air leave me in a quiet rush. Not because of the way the photo captured her fleeting youth, but because of the way it highlighted the bruise. It was a photo of me. Rachel Price has just one happy memory from her childhood: the moment her father took her hands while playing outside...

Joan Sample is not living the life she expected. Now a widow and an empty-nester, she has become by her own admission something of a recluse. But after another birthday spent alone, she is finally inclined to listen to her sister, who has been begging Joan to reengage with the world. With her support, Joan gathers the courage to take some long-awaited steps: hiring someone to tame her overgrown garden, joining a grief support group, and even renting...