A devoted husband and father, fairly decent employer, and mostly honest businessman, Silas Lapham has used his father's small paint company to amass a large fortune. But he yearns to “enter society” and for his two daughters, Penelope and Irene, to marry well. However, blue-blooded Tom Corey's love for one of the Lapham daughters is thwarted by his mother, who believes Penelope is an overly independent social climber. Meanwhile, Silas's efforts...

When a woman's bacteriologist husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to work in a cholera epidemic, hoping that she will die.

María moved to the city in 1969, leaving her daughter with her family but hoping to save enough to take care of her one day. She worked as a housekeeper, a caregiver, a cleaner--somehow always taking care of someone else. Two generations later, during the Women's March in 2018, Alicia was working at the snack shop in the Atocha train station when it overflowed with protesters and strikers. Women, so many women, were flooding the streets with their...

On a sweltering summer day, Makiko travels from Osaka to Tokyo, where her sister Natsu lives. She is in the company of her daughter, Midoriko, who has lately grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with adolescence. The story of these three women reunited in a working-class neighborhood of Tokyo is told through the gaze of Natsu-thirty years old, an aspiring writer, haunted by hardships endured...

"From the author of the "original and electric" Braised Pork (Time), An Yu's enchanting and contemplative novel of music and mushrooms follows a former concert pianist searching for the truth about a vanished musician. For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, but her husband Bowen, an executive...

"Thirty-six-year-old Gabriella Stevens is living quietly and contentedly as a devoted housewife to Simon--just as her traditional Filipino mother has always told her to do--when, after sixteen years of marriage and twenty years together, he tells he wants a divorce. With New York City as her backdrop, Gabby--single for the first time since she was a teenager--goes back to school, gets her first real job, and faces unfamiliar reality with determination....

After Mimi Slavitt's three-year-old son, Danny, is diagnosed with autism, she finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son's. It is a position she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual...

"After a desperate search for her birth mother, fashionista Lily Rose is forced to confront her turbulent past. Love has set the tone for most of Lily Rose's young life in Cumberland Falls, high in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. But her perfect world falls apart when her beloved adopted parents are tragically killed and she is sent to live at Red Rose Farm, in the Bluegrass. Lily starts high school and meets her first love, who introduces the...

Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indignation at the fallen state of mid-Victorian society. Crammed with persons and incidents in whose recreation nothing is accidental or spurious, containing, in its picture of the Circumlocution Office, the most witheringly exact satire of a bureaucracy we possess, Little Dorrit is a stunning...