The Magnificent Ambersons is the epic story of an American family's traumatic tumble from the dizzying heights of fame and fortune. A dynasty spanning three generations, the Ambersons' pre-eminence as society's elite is threatened -- not only by a hungry new breed of industrial entrepreneur -- but from its own arrogance and greed. At the center of the story is George Amberson Minafer, the pampered but pitiful, scion of the clan upon whose shoulders...

"The story of a young woman from Wisconsin who goes to Chicago, becomes an actress, marries and moves to New York, and when her husband loses his job, returns to the stage." ***"A powerful account of a young working girl's rise to the 'tinsel and shine' of worldly success, and of the slow decline of her lover and protector Hurstwood." Oxford Companion to Engl Lit. ***"Plain, unaffected, and unconventional story of the actual life of the lower middle-classes...

It's 2008, and the rise of Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He's eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to, and abandoned, when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she'd never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past. Returning...

"Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister, Mabel, have no one but each other--with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and...

Successful environmental lawyer Abby Williams is forced to confront her small-town past while investigating a high-profile corruption case back home.

The disappearance of nine-year-old Katie Mackey, the daughter of the most affluent family in a small Indiana town, while riding her bicycle to town to return some library books, has profound repercussions for her entire family.

A patient at Juniper Hill, a mental institution, novelist Virginia Cunningham's only ties to the outside world is through her husband. Virginia's unreliable observations of the patients and staff at Juniper Hill reveal the complexity of her mental state.

A respectable lawyer, a summer bachelor, comes home to find his apartment occupied by a couple of hipsters, and four days of terror follow.