[S]]hows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter. Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed...

In a moment of desperation, Devon McAllister takes her daughter and flees a place where they should have been safe and secure. Her plan is to escape to somewhere she can be invisible. Instead, an offer of assistance leads her to Thunder Point, an Oregon town with a willingness to help someone in need. As the widowed father of a vulnerable young boy, Spencer Lawson knows something about needing friendship. But he's not looking for anything else. Instead,...

With Bernard, her husband of fifty-five years, now in the grave, seventy-eight-year-old Harriet Chance impulsively sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise that her late husband had planned. But what she hoped would be a voyage leading to a new lease on life becomes a surprising and revelatory journey into Harriets past.There, amid the overwhelming buffets and the incessant lounge singers, between the imagined appearances of her late husband and...

Follows the story of four lifelong friends, whose lives are filled with joy and heartbreak, and shows how their experiences have affected the hopes and dreams they hold for each of their children.

Bethanne Hamlin takes a road trip with her daughter, Annie, and her former mother-in-law, Ruth. They're driving to Florida for Ruth's 50th high school reunion. A long-time widow, Ruth would like very much to reconnect with Royce, the love of her youth. Bethanne's ex-husband, Grant, would like to reconcile, so she also has a major life decision to consider. And Annie is out to prove to her onetime boyfriend that she can live a brilliant life without...

In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forge a relationship that binds them for more than three decades.

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of the author's 2016 novel My name is...

"A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling...

Miami attorney Jack Swyteck lands in the heart of the contentious immigration debate when he takes on the heart-wrenching case of an undocumented immigrant who fled to America to protect her daughter and save herself. Julia Rodriguez and her teenage daughter, Beatriz, escaped bloodthirsty gangs, random violence, and Julia's abusive husband back in El Salvador. Arriving in Miami, mother and daughter struggled to carve their own piece of the American...

Alice Metcalf was a devoted mother, loving wife, and accomplished scientist who studied grief among elephants. Yet it's been a decade since she disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind her small daughter, husband, and the animals to which she devoted her life. All signs point to abandonment . . . or worse. Still Jenna--now thirteen years old and truly orphaned by a father maddened by grief--steadfastly refuses to believe in her mother's...