William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy: his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. His skill on the basketball court earned him a scholarship to a college far away from his childhood home. Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman, surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her three younger sisters: Sylvie, the dreamer, happiest with her nose in a book and dreams...

The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.

Coming of age in middle America, eighteen-year-old Rosemary evaluates how her entire youth was defined by the presence and forced removal of an endearing chimpanzee who was secretly regarded as a family member and who Rosemary loved as a sister.

Though Iris Stern considers herself a modern woman, with a successful academic career and a happy marriage, she still holds steadfast to her old-fashioned sensibilities. But as the mother of three adult children, each with their own lives and burdens to bear, she often finds those sensibilities called into question when confronted with the choices her children have made.

Growing up on the Puget Sound, the Johannssen family has sailing in their blood, but the oldest brother, Josh, is left puzzling over what caused his siblings to flee, one to Africa, the other to points unknown as a fugitive and pirate.

"FORECAST: Storm clouds are on the horizon in L.A. Weather, a fun, fast-paced novel of an affluent Mexican-American family from the author of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller Esperanza's Box of Saints. L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He's harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life...

At the turn of the twentieth century, reclusive orchardist William Talmadge tends to his apples and apricots. One day, two teenaged girls steal his fruit and later return to see the man who gave them no chase. Feral, scared, and pregnant, they take up on Talmadge's land and indulge in his reservoir of compassion. But just as the girls begin to trust him, men arrive in the orchard with guns...

"This beautiful novel tells the love story of young Arthur Moses and Nola, and how a young man grew up to become the wise old man known as Arthur Trulove. Set in the 1950s in the warm community of Mason, Missouri, Arthur is a shy, unathletic teenage boy, in love with the most beautiful girl in his class. He is thrilled when they become friends, but he wants more than friendship. Alas, he learns that Nola has a crush on the wrong Moses--Arthur's older...

Celia Scott and her family move back to her husband's hometown in Kansas, where his sister died under mysterious circumstances twenty years before, and where Celia and two of her children struggle to adjust--especially when a local girl disappears.