Ruby Lennox is conceived to the twelve strokes of her great-grandmother's clock. Born in her father's absense (he's courting a stranger at the Dog and Hare), she is delivered under the new reign of Queen Elizabeth II by an angry doctor late for dinner. Beginning as a cluster of cells in her mother's womb, Ruby narrates the epic tale of her life and all the lives that led to it. Many end in death, as lives tend to - her family has a knack for getting...

A Chinese immigrant who is convinced she is dying threatens to celebrate the Chinese New Year by unburdening herself of everybody's hidden truths, thus prompting a series of comic misunderstandings.

"Tessa Jamison couldn't have imagined anything worse than losing her beloved twin girls and husband--until she was convicted of their murder. For ten years, she has counted off the days in Florida's Correctional Center for Women, fully expecting to die behind bars. Fighting to prove her innocence holds little appeal now that her family's gone. But on one extraordinary day, her lawyers announce that Tessa's conviction has been overturned due to a technicality,...

"Sometimes life is so hard and then, bingo, it's like happiness is pushing at your back, waiting to come out of your front ..." On the hot Texas army base she calls home, Katie spends the lazy days of her summer waiting: waiting to grow up; waiting for Dickie Mack to fall in love with her; waiting for her breasts to blossom; waiting for the beatings to stop. Since their mother died, Katie and her older sister, Diane, have been struggling to understand...

"A marriage is always two intersecting stories."
This realization comes perhaps too late to the husband of Etna Bliss-a man whose obsession with his young wife begins at the moment of their first meeting, as he helps Etna and her companions escape from a fire in a hotel restaurant, and culminates in a marriage doomed by secrets and betrayal.
Written with the intelligence and grace that are the hallmarks of Anita Shreve's bestselling novels,...

"A best-selling and beloved author, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made Nobody's Fool, his third novel, his first great success. The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is now staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he only has a year or two left, and he's busy as hell keeping the news from the most important people in...

"Steel Magnolias" meets "The Help" in this Southern debut novel sparkling with humor, heart, and feminine wisdom. Laugh-out-loud funny, Hoffman's charming work offers the story of a young girl who loses one mother and finds many others. For years, 12-year-old CeeCee Honeycutt has been the caretaker of her psychotic mother, Camille-the tiara-toting, lipstick-smeared laughingstock of an entire town. But when Camille is hit by a truck and killed, CeeCee...

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.

The New York Times bestselling sensation that's "Steel Magnolias set in Manhattan" (USA Today)Once a week, an eclectic group of women comes together at a New York City yarn shop to work on their latest projects—and share the stories of their lives...

Walker & Daughter is Georgia Walker's little yarn shop, tucked into a quiet storefront on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Its Friday night knitting club is improvised by some of Georgia's

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"The Beans of Egypt, Maine introduced the world to the notorious, unforgettable Bean clan of small town Egypt, Maine--from wild man Reuben, an alcoholic who can't seem to keep himself out of jail; to his cousins, the perpetually pregnant Roberta, and Beal, a man gentle by temperament but violent in defeat who marries his pious neighbor, Earlene Pomerleau before poverty kills him. As the Beans struggled with their inner demons to survive against hardship...