"Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South is the story of Margaret Hale, the daughter of a local priest in Hampshire, whose father decides to leave his country church after a serious crisis of faith. All the events that follow happen in the fictional industrial English town named Milton to which the Hale family has moved. Thus, part of the narrative focuses on the juxtaposition between industrial areas and the countryside. Margaret is very critical of...

Eight-year-old Cassie Witting is upset when she finds out that her mother, Sarah, is expecting a baby, but writing in the journal that belonged to her brother Caleb helps her sort out her feelings and understand that Sarah will always love her.

Left alone during the Civil War when her new husband, Dru Talbot, rides off to join the Confederate army, Sara Collier grieves when he dies tragically on the battlefield. But as she struggles to rebuild her life as a widow, she is stunned to discover that Dru is not dead when he returns home a year after the end of the war.

"Brooklyn, 2001.  Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, sixteen-year-old Melody celebrates her coming of age wearing a custom-made dress - the very same dress that was sewn for Melody's mother for a celebration that ultimately never took place.  Unfurling the history of Melody's family - from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to post 9/11 New York - Red at the Bone explores sexual desire, race, class and the life-altering facts of parenthood,...

Hawaii, 1944. With the island overrun by troops training for a secret mission, tension and suspicion between neighbors is rising. Violet Iverson and her young daughter, Ella, are piecing their lives together one year after the disappearance of her husband. As rumors swirl and questions about his loyalties surface, Violet believes Ella knows something. To support themselves, they open a pie stand near the military base, offering the soldiers a little...

Violet Minturn, a half-Chinese/half-American courtesan who deals in seduction and illusion in Shanghai, struggles to find her place in the world, while her mother, Lucia, tries to make sense of the choices she has made and the men who have shaped her.

Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker, moonlighting as a dance-hall girl to help pay off her mother's mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin plunges into a dark adventure: a mirror world of secrets and superstitions. Eleven-year-old Chinese houseboy Ren also has a secret, a promise he must fulfill to his dead master; to find his master's severed finger...

After their mother abandons them during the Great Depression, eleven-year-old Tennyson Fontaine and her little sister Hattie are sent to live with their eccentric Aunt Henrietta in a decaying plantation house outside of New Orleans.

"A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai. In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic...

Inadvertently reunited with the daughter she secretly abandoned and the girl's Irish Catholic adoptive mother during the height of the Prohibition era, the adult daughter of a Jewish industrialist finds her life turned upside down by her daughter's bold and unconventional personality.