"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...

As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets

An evocative story of friendship set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century China in which women suffered from foot binding, isolation, and illiteracy follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, American swimmer Sydney Stringfellow finds herself falling in love with Horst Gerhardt, a dashing young German. When the rising tide of global conflict tears them apart, Sydney returns to America, where she finds love again-in the arms of Jimmy Branch, an American man who takes her hand in marriage before shipping off to fight in World War II. And that is when Horst reappears in Sydney's life, drawing her into a dilemma...

"Dov and Yitzhak live in a small village in the mountains of Hungary, isolated both from the world and from the horrors of the war. But one day in 1944, everything changes. The Nazis storm the homes of the Jewish villagers and inform them they have one hour. One hour before the train will take them to Auschwitz. Six decades later, from the safety of their living rooms at home in Israel, the brothers finally break their silence to a friend who will...

"A visionary and deeply moving novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early twentieth century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the French trenches during World War I to a newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, moments...

If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said? At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He's alone, as usual, though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story. Over the course of this evening,...

An old man reminisces about his first love, a young runaway who taught him more about life than anyone had before or since

Determined to leave a mark on the world even though they are in the hospital and their days are dwindling, unlikely friends, seventeen-year-old Lenni and eighty-three-year-old Margot, devise a plan to create one hundred paintings showcasing the stories of the century they have lived. Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson has been told she's dying, but still has plenty of living to do. She lives on the Terminal Ward at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital....

From the author of the highly acclaimed A Fine Balance comes Rohinton Mistry’s eagerly anticipated new novel is set in Bombay in the mid-1990s. Nariman, an ailing, elderly Parsi widower, lives with his middle-aged stepchildren and dreams of the past. When he breaks an ankle and can no longer partake of his one pleasure, a daily walk through the neighborhood, his bitter stepdaughter schemes to move him to her sister's home and relieve herself

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