Following a tragedy, Elfrida Phipps takes refuge in a rambling house called Corrydale in the north of Scotland, which attracts a motley assortment of waifs and strays, each trying to escape a difficult personal past.

Baltimore woman disappears during family vacation, declares the headline. Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace or reason. But for Delia, who feels like a tiny gnat buzzing around her family's edges, "walking away from it all"...

Having lost virtually everything - his wife, family, home, and livelihood - Benjamin Benjamin enrolls in The Fundamentals of Caregiving, where he is instructed in the art of inserting catheters, avoiding liability, and keeping distance between client and provider. But Ben soon discovers that this has done little to prepare him for the reality of caring for a tyrannical nineteen-year-old in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Possessing an unsettling ability to predict random future events, Anchorage resident David Winkler foresees his infant daughter's drowning death and travels thousands of miles to Ohio and the Caribbean to prevent the tragedy.

Anny Butler is a caretaker, a nurturer, first for her own brothers and sisters, and then as a director of an agency devoted to the welfare of children. What she has never had is a real family. That changes when she meets and marries Lewis Aiken, an exuberant surgeon fifteen years older than Anny. When they marry, she finds her family -- not a traditional one, but a group of Charleston childhood friends who are inseparable, who are one another's surrogate...

With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, nineteen-year-old Harley Altmyer cares for his three sisters in a small Pennsylvania coal town, but despite his responsibilities, he is still a teenage boy and lusts after the mother of two who lives down the road.

When a bizarre phenomenon causes the cataclysmic disappearances of numerous people all over the world, Kevin Garvey, the new mayor of a once-comfortable suburban community, struggles to help his neighbors heal while enduring the fanatical religious conversions of his wife and son.

It's been thirty years since Antonie's and Melanie's mother died. But when a visit to the sea at Noirmoutier Island triggers painful memories of their haunting childhood--and Melanie lies in the hospital recovering from a near fatal accident--Antoine must confront his past and also his troubled relationships with his own children.

In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier find that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls...

"Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summers evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they could...