It’s 1965. Twenty-two-year-old Linda Wise despairs of escaping her overprotective parents and her hometown, where far too many know she was sexually assaulted as a teenager. Deliverance arrives in the form of marriage to the charismatic, twenty-six-year-old Ronald Brunson, a newly ordained Methodist minister who ignites her passion for social justice. Ron tells her war and racial discrimination are symptoms of the “moral rot” destroying the country, conjuring up something dark and rancid i...

Stony River, New Jersey, 1955: On a sweltering June afternoon, Linda Wise and Tereza Dobra witness a disturbing scene. A pale, pretty girl who looks about their age is taken from Crazy Haggerty’s house by two uniformed policemen. Everyone in Stony River thought Crazy Haggerty lived alone. The pale, pretty girl is about to enter an alien world, and as Tereza and Linda try to make sense of what they’ve seen, they’re unaware their own lives will soon be shattered as well. Set in a decade we t...

Silent Girl explores the experiences of unforgettable characters as they follow trajectories unimagined by Shakespeare, including a young girl who is unwittingly sold to traffickers after losing her mother in the 2004 tsunami in the title story; an ambitious, proud student in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan who finds her dreams taken hostage in Kesh Kumay; a young woman in an interracial marriage who devises a desperate plan to help her tortured husband after his return from Vietnam in Nobody; I My...

From the acclaimed author of Stony River comes a fascinating story about a woman ensnared in the past like an insect in amber. Sona is an accomplished professional with a tangled, complicated history. She’s a wife without a husband and a mother without a child. But as she recounts her story of victimization to a group of sympathetic supporters, the gaps and inconsistencies suggest an even more disturbing reality. Deep Dark Waves is a bracingly honest account of marital discord, revenge and...

From award-winning writer Billie Livingston, an unsparing novel of loyalty and survival that is fierce, sharp and funny even when it's breaking your heart.The child of two con artists, 16-year-old Sammie Bell always prided herself on knowing the score. But now she finds herself backed into a corner. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death—a goal Sam...

When her widower father drowns at sea, ten-year-old Gemma Hardy, an only child, is taken from her native Iceland to Scotland, to live with her uncle’s family. But the death of her doting guardian soon after leaves Gemma under the resentful eye of her aunt. When she receives a scholarship to a private school, Gemma believes she’s found the perfect solution, and she eagerly sets out again to a new home. But at Claypoole, she finds herself treated as an unpaid servant.To Gemma’s delig...

Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I’m a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that.Here is the second thing: that young woman they pulled from the Arabian shore, her hair tangled with mangrove—my husband didn’t kill her, not the way they say he did.Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by ...

A man reminisces about growing up with an abusive father in a transient Southern family, in this debut novel by the author of How I Shed My Skin.On a snowy Thanksgiving Day in North Carolina, a dreamy eight-year-old Danny Crell is pushed headlong into the adult world by a violent quarrel between his parents, Bobjay and Ellen.Bobjay is no longer the man young Ellen married. A debilitating farm accident and a steady consumption of alcohol have seen t...

A novel about what happens when we view our neighbours as “The Other” and the transformative power of unlikely friendships, Our Daily Bread is inspired by the true story of the Goler Clan of Nova Scotia.The Erskine Clan, long shunned by the people of Gideon, live in secrecy and isolation on North Mountain. For generations, the clan’s children have suffered unspeakable acts of abuse, incest and psychological torture. The intolerant, self-righteous Gideonites decline to inte...

**From the New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage.With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist," author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and the two teenage girls caught in the middle.**Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families—the public one and the secret...

What happens when the tidy, prosperous life of an urban couple is turned inside out by a tragedy with unexpected consequences? After a car crash leaves their friend Marcus dead and his wife Sarah in a coma, Ana and James are shocked to discover that they have become the legal guardians of a 2½-year-old, Finn. Finn's crash-landing in their lives throws into high relief deeply rooted, and sometimes long-hidden, truths about themselves, both individually and as a couple. Several chaotic, poig...

On August 30, 1993, Roberta Moore drove to work; it was a cold, rainy morning. She had left her two sons and little daughter at home with her husband. He was supposed to make sure they got dressed in time to catch the school bus.She had been on the job for only thirty minutes when she received a call at 7:45 a.m. Roberta was surprised to hear her husband's voice on the line. John Moore told his wife he couldn't find their sons. Robert, 13, and Benjamin (Ben), 10, were missing....