Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, To the Lighthouse is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality. Observed across the years at their vacation house facing the gales of the North Atlantic, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the...

"Rob Coates feels like he's won the lottery of life. There is Anna, his incredible wife, their London town house and, most precious of all, Jack, their son, who makes every day an extraordinary adventure. But when a devastating illness befalls his family, Rob's world begins to unravel. Suddenly finding himself alone, Rob seeks solace in photographing the skyscrapers and clifftops he and his son Jack used to visit. And just when it seems that all hope...

Starting her life over after the death of her husband, a New England psychologist takes a job as an animal control warden and slowly heals from her grief through friendships with a young anorexic, an archery instructor, and an injured oversized dog.

"At age fifty-five, Meg's life is too filled with loss for her to remember what magic feels like. All she has left is a yard brimming with plants that are wilting in the scorching Iowa summer--and a bone-deep feeling that she's through with living. Meg has something else too: a bottle of mysterious pills, given to her years ago by an empathetic doctor. He promised that they would offer her dying mother a quick, painless end in exactly twenty days....

It's been fifty years since Antonio Grasso married Maddalena and brought her to America. That was the last time she saw her parents, her sisters and brothers-- everything she knew and loved in the village of Santa Cecilia, Italy. Their daughter Prima was raised on the lore of the Old Country. And as she sees her parents aging, she hatches the idea to take the entire family back to Italy-- hoping to reunite Maddalena with her estranged sister and let...

Five women gather at a West Texas hospital after an oil rig accident kills four men and burns the one survivor beyond recognition. As they wait together to find out which husband survived, the women come to know each other and learn how to cope with the tragedy.

Raised in the idyllic setting of Dorlcote Mill, the wild and wilful Maggie Tulliver adores her elder brother Tom and is forever trying to gain the approbation of her parents. Yet, as she grows older and the family struggle under the weight of severe pecuniary difficulties, she becomes increasingly caught between the divergent expectations of the four men in her life: a doting father, an obdurate and vengeful brother, a good-looking and frivolous suitor...

Piper, the adopted teenage daughter of Kathryn and Tom Scanlon, refuses to believe that her mother's gruesome death was a freak accident-especially once another sordid story featuring a shared suspect comes to light.

Swindled out of his home by his gold-digging wife, successful accountant Gus Hollister returns to his grandmother Rose's Virginia farmhouse where he helps the residents of Blossom Farm expand their business and finds the courage to love again.

Prate Marshbanks proposed to his future wife on a muggy July night at Pete's Drive-in back in '52. "She said yes to me between bites of a slaw burger all-the-way." A college graduate and daughter of a prominent lawyer, Irene was an unlikely match for Prate, a high school dropout. He lived his married life aware of the question on people's minds: How in the world did a tall, thin, fair-skinned beauty and one of the most respected high school English...