"Civilization has been rebuilt after an unspoken "Something that Happened" five hundred years ago. Society is now color vision-segregated, professions, marriages, and leisure activities all dictated by an individual's visual ability, and everything run by the shadowy National Color in far-off Emerald City. Out on the fringes of Red Sector West, twenty-year-old Eddie Russett is being bullied into an arranged marriage with the powerful DeMauve family,...

"After the Last War destroyed most of the world, survivors form a new society in four self-sustaining cities in the Mojave Desert. In the utopia of the Four Cities, inspired by the lyrics of ''Imagine'' and Buddhist philosophy, everything is carefully planned and controlled: the seasons, the weather - and the residents. To prevent mankind from destroying each other again, its citizens undergo a memory wipe every four years in a process called tabula...

"Raised to be obedient by a stern grandmother in a blue-collar town in Massachusetts, Rosie accepts a scholarship to art school in New York City in the 1980s. One morning at a museum, she meets a worldly man twenty years her senior, with access to the upper crust of New England society. Bennett is dashing, knows that 'polo' refers only to ponies, teaches her which direction to spoon soup, and tells of exotic escapades with Truman Capote and Hunter...