"The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays."-- ""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious...

At twenty-one, Shandi Pierce is juggling finishing college, raising her delightful three-year-old genius son Natty, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced Catholic mother and Jewish father. She has got enough complications without getting caught in the middle of a stick-up in a gas station mini-mart and falling in love with a great wall of a man named William Ashe, who willingly steps between the armed robber and her son....

"That Kind of Mother dives deep into big questions about parenthood, adoption, and race: Is mothering something learned, or that you're born to? How far can good intentions stretch? And most of all, can love really overcome the boundaries of race and class? With his unerring eye for nuance and unsparing sense of irony, Rumaan Alam's second novel is both heartfelt and thought-provoking."--Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere...From the celebrated...

Kate's life as sommelier in San Francisco is far removed from the French vineyard her mother turned her back on a generation ago. Her shaky knowledge of Burgundy vintages has been acceptable--until now, as she faces her final attempt at passing the notoriously difficult Master of Wine examination. And so, Kate returns to the vineyard to help with the harvest and study the local wine, all while hoping to avoid Jean-Luc, a neighboring winemaker and...

Swept off her feet by a costumed man at a comics convention, a graphic novelist discovers that she is pregnant with a biracial child and avoids telling her conventional Southern family while assisting her elderly grandmother, who has been hiding a dangerous secret linked to the Civil War.

What do you do when one youthful indiscretion threatens to derail the rest of your life? Aviva Grossman is a bright, ambitious Congressional intern with a promising future in front of her--until her Lewinsky-esque affair with a married Congressman comes to a crashing end. Literally. (She's in a car crash with the Congressman and that's how their affair makes the news.) After unsuccessfully trying her best to bounce back and restart her life, she decides...

"When Dr. Croft takes in orphan Eleanor Beady, he doesn't realize that he's gained an apprentice. Raised amidst Croft's experiments, "Nora" becomes his most trusted assistant--an unthinkable and unlawful pursuit for a woman. Nora helps Croft's groundbreaking research and his clinic gain recognition, and she finds she doesn't mind working in the background, as long as she can continue to hone her skills. But the arrival of a new surgical resident threatens...

When the renowned poet Fiona Skinner is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, The Love Poem, she tells her audience a story about her family and a betrayal that reverberates through time. It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and a brief variation forever known as the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that...

"From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched...

Dellarobia Turnbow is a discontent farm wife engaging in a flirtatious relationship with a younger man when she discovers an unusual fire in a forested valley behind her house. This curiosity causes a stir in the scientific and local communities, garnering a great deal of media attention and leads to Dellarobia confronting and questioning everything she thought she believed in.