The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a black girl in an America whose love for its blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

After his wife leaves him for another man, Hugues Martin's life revolves solely around two things--the celebrated five-star hotel he owns and manages in New York City and his daughter Heloise. At four, Heloise becomes the only woman in her father's life; by seven, she is the undisputed queen of the Hotel Vendome. And as the years pass, despite her mother's abandonment, she basks in her father's love, the devotion of the hotel's staff, and the affection...

Forty-year-old Julia Bechtel, unambitious and vaguely unhappy in her marriage, finds herself restless after surviving a boating accident off the coast of Maine that kills nine people, and strangely connected to the other survivors: a divorced lobsterman and a young woman made mute by the trauma.