Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and the secret father of her child, Pearl, struggles with the agony of conscience and his own weakness. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, revenges himself on Dimmesdale by calculating assaults on the frail mental state of the conscience-stricken cleric. The result is an American tragedy of stark...

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. In The Namesake,...

"Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still...

Summoned by her ailing Uncle Pal to operate his pony ring for a final season, reluctant Robyn Panek returns to the beloved Massachusetts farm of her childhood, hoping to put to rest the traumatic events that shattered her childhood.

It is the summer of 1967 and Leo Suther is about to turn eighteen. This is the summer that everyone has something to teach Leo. His father warns him that "life can turn on a dime." Allie, his girlfriend, wants to teach him about love. Her father, the local communist and civil rights organizer, lectures him on politics and carpentry. And Ryder, a family friend, wants to show Leo the magic of the harmonica--harp of the blues. However, when Leo's life...

Sophy Chase is pulled back into a life she thought she left behid when her almost ex-husband dies mysteriously at his Massachusetts island home.

Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain "devoted"-as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters' long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn't understand how Frances can ignore the past their father's presence revives,...

Reluctantly, Sean Devine confronts the world of violence and pain when his childhood friend's daughter is murdered and the investigation brings him face to face with a vigilante killer and a man with a dangerous secret. When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car drove up their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened, something that ended their friendship...

Toby Maytree, an aspiring poet, and artist Lou Bigelow meet and fall in love in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts, have a child they both adore, and surprise everyone when their feelings for each other prove deep enough to transcend a shocking betrayal.

Mr. Marquand's novel of manners is the story of Charles Gray, born into a "lower-upper" family, who struggles to find a meaning to life from his position in a bank, and then reaches a point of no return when either he is promoted or he is not.