When Liv and Nora decide to take their families on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The ship's comforts and possibilities seem infinite. The children--two eleven-year-olds, an eight-year-old, and a six-year-old--love the nonstop buffet and the independence they have at the Kids' Club. But when they all go ashore in beautiful Central America, a series of minor misfortunes leads the families farther and farther from the ship's safety. One minute...

Daisy Fay is not afraid to speak what is on her mind, and the townspeople in the Gulf Coast's Shell Beach don't always appreciate her meddling in their business.

Having lost touch with each other over the years, Carmen, Lena, and Bridget are surprised when they receive plane tickets to travel to Australia for a reunion with Tibby; but after tragedy strikes, their lives are changed forever.

The story involves a young man (Hans Castorp), who visits a cousin in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps before World War I. After manifesting symptoms of tuberculosis, he remains there for seven years. The characters he meets during this time forms a microcosm of pre-war Europe and represents a classic example of the German Bildungsroman. The work was instrumental in winning Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1929.

"White Ivy begins as many coming-to-America stories do: Ivy Lin, a Chinese immigrant, grows up in a low-income apartment complex in Massachusetts desperate to assimilate with her American peers. She develops a crush on the golden boy Gideon Speyer, whose patrician New England family is the paragon of the WASP ideal. Ivy's mother is a Tiger Mom, berating Ivy regularly when she disapproves of her grades, her looks, her attitude. But that's where the...

Laura and Casey were inseparable, dreaming about the future and teaming up for the wild scavenger hunts in their small California lakeside town. Until one summer night when a shocking betrayal sent Laura running into a new life, leaving Casey and a first love in her wake. Seventeen years later Laura is pulled home--and into one more scavenger hunt with Casey. The twist: this time, the list of clues leads to the settings of their most cherished summer...

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades,...

The chaotic events of World War II force Elizabeth White, a young English girl, to escape to Ireland, where she shares a friendship with Aisling O'Connor, with whom she endures years of change, joy, sorrow, betrayals, and an unbreakable bond.

In 1940, a tragedy forces Lou, her little brother Oz, and their invalid mother to move to the mountains of southeastern Virginia, but a courtroom battle could determine the fate of the entire family. The lives of twelve-year-old Lou and her younger brother, Oz, change forever in 1940 when an accident involving their parents results in their being uprooted from their New York City home and moved to live with their great-grandmother in the mountains...

Hannah Roberts is the golden only-child with a perfectly scheduled life, raised in a prominent political family. Living with her wealthy, unaffectionate grandmother while her parents work abroad, Hannah prepares to spend a lonely Christmas when she learns a shocking truth: the man she believed was her father is not her parent after all. In an effort to find answers, she begins a desperate search for her real father, Army helicopter pilot Mike Conner,...