Hope Anderson is at a crossroads. At 36, she's been dating her boyfriend, an orthopedic surgeon, for six years. With no wedding plans in sight, and her father recently diagnosed with ALS, she decides to use a week at her family's cottage in Sunset Beach, North Carolina, to ready the house for sale and mull over some difficult decisions about her future. Tru Walls has never visited North Carolina, but is summoned to Sunset Beach by a letter from a...

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she...

In 1945, just after World War II, fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem,...

"Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as 'my grandfather.' It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact--and the creative power--of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait...

"On a spring morning in 1951, eleven-year-old chemist and aspiring detective Flavia de Luce gathers with her family at the railway station, awaiting the return of her long-lost mother, Harriet. Yet upon the train's arrival in the English village of Bishop's Lacey, Flavia is approached by a tall stranger who whispers a cryptic message into her ear. Moments later, he is dead, mysteriously pushed under the train by someone in the crowd. Who was this...

"Mackenzie Cooper took her eyes off the road just long enough to rob her of her beloved daughter and ultimately of her new marriage, family, friends, and privacy. Now she lives in Vermont under the name Maggie Reid. She's thankful for her new friends--though she can't risk telling them too much-- and takes satisfaction in working as a makeup artist. Covering up scars is a skill she has mastered. Then a friend's teenage son is thrust into the national...

To help his oldest daughter through a crisis, 70-year-old farmer Percy Darling sacrifices his reclusive lifestyle and allows a preschool to move into his barn. However, his new sociality forces him to take a hard look at how he has lived his life for the past 30 years since his wife's tragic death. Meanwhile, his grandson Robert takes to the Harvard campus with a renewed sense of environmental consciousness, something which only leads him to trouble...

"In Belfast, Northern Ireland, memories of the city's troubled history haunt every street corner, but for one tortured soul, the incredible violence in his past is also his most cherished legacy. Rea Carlisle--daughter of influential Stormont politician Graham Carlisle--has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew. It doesn't take her long to clear out the dead man's remaining possessions, but one of the upstairs rooms remains stubbornly locked....

A beloved aunt's agreement to help her niece with college essays reawakens past secrets about the night a grandparent was murdered, an event that compels the woman to investigate a treasured music box to uncover the truth.

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family -- their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog -- is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and...