From the author of "The House at Riverton" comes a story of outer and inner journeys as "Nell," abandoned as a child, leaves her adoptive parents in Australia and travels to England to trace her story, to find her real identity--a quest that ultimately leads her to Blackhurst Manor on the Cornish coast and the secrets of the doomed Mountrachet family.

Winter has come to Route 117, a remote road through the high desert of Utah trafficked only by eccentrics, fugitives, and those looking to escape the world. Local truck driver Ben Jones, still in mourning over a heartbreaking loss, finds a mute Hispanic child who has been abandoned at a seedy truck stop along his route, far from civilization and bearing a note that simply reads "Please Ben. Watch my son. His name is Juan." At the bottom: "Bad Trouble....

Russ Millings has just been released from prison after serving 21 years for a third strike conviction for possessing an ounce of marijuana. As he tries to adapt to a world he doesn't recognize, including trying to learn how to use the internet, he finds an abandoned baby in a dumpster behind the fast-food restaurant where he works as a dishwasher. Unsure of what to do, and caught between impulses of kindness and panic, Russ soon realizes this could...

Drug addicted, alcoholic single mother Sheila leaves her two children in a campground with a phone number written on her toddler's back. Years later Tessa Lee her daughter runs away from her grandparents and finds her mother. After she tells Sheila of the death of Travis, her younger brother, she loses her mother again.

Rescuing a newborn that has been abandoned in a dumpster, LAPD officer Cindy Decker, the wife of detective Peter Decker, begins a search through inner-city Hollywood in search of the baby's mother and uncovers a dangerous drug ring.

Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent. Raised by loving adoptive parents, she grew into a wanderer, drawn by the landscape of the British countryside. One summer, following the miscarriage of a much-longed-for child, Katharine sets out - accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter, Evie - with the idea of following a river from the sea to its source. The luminously observed landscape grounds the walkers, earths them, providing...

"Gertie is a girl on a mission to be the best fifth grader ever in order to show her estranged mother that Gertie doesn't need her--not one bit!"--

Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate the first automobile any of them have seen and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced...

Fifteen-year-old Jenn McDaniel's life on Whidbey Island becomes more complicated and her relationships with old and new friends take strange turns, partly due to the arrival of a woman researching a strange black seal.