She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can't get the girl out of her head... Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and...

“A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.”—Kansas City Star
Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts...

In an account of the collision of two cultures, an English widow on a grand tour of the continent surprises her stodgy relatives by marrying a penniless Italian

Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love.
Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia Naughton–wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton–is...

The story of a family in crisis and the loyal dog that holds them together, from the witty, imaginative author of The Dead Fathers Club. The Hunters - Adam, Kate, and their children Hal and Charlotte - are a typical family, with typical concerns: work, money, love, the trials of adolescence. What sets them apart is Prince, their black labrador. Prince is an earnest and determined young dog. He strives to live up to the tenets of the Labrador Pact:...

Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks.) But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life...

"From National Book Award finalist and "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), Charles Baxter, a timely and unsettling new novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears. Brettigan's son, a once promising actor, has gone missing, and despite the fact that his wife, Alma, knows he left on purpose, she has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places, churches,...

Four novels trace the life of Harry Rabbit Angstrom against the changing American society from the sixties to the eighties.