Growing up in 1950s Detroit, Jo and Bethie Kaufman's roles in the family are clearly defined. Jo is the tomboy, the bookish rebel with a passion to make the world more fair; Bethie is the pretty, feminine good girl, a would-be star who enjoys the power her beauty confers and dreams of a traditional life. As their lives unfold against the background of free love and Vietnam, Woodstock and women's lib, Bethie becomes an adventure-loving wild child who...

"A sweeping, propulsive novel about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves, in which two brothers struggle to find their place in an Iran on the brink of combusting. Amid the alleyways of the Zamzam neighborhood of Tehran, a woman lights herself on fire in a desperate act of defiance, setting off a chain reaction of violence and protest. Haunted by the woman's death, Issa is forced to confront the contradictions within...

"From the author of the "jaunty, heartbreaking winner" (People) and international bestseller Dear Mrs. Bird, a new charming and uplifting novel set in London during World War II about a plucky aspiring journalist. London, November 1941. Following the departure of the formidable Henrietta Bird from Woman's Friend magazine, things are looking up for Emmeline Lake as she takes on the challenge of becoming a young wartime advice columnist. Her relationship...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a riveting slow burn of a noir about a daydreaming secretary, a lonesome enforcer, and the mystery of the missing woman they're both desperate to find. 1970s Mexico City. Maite is a secretary who lives for one thing: the latest issue of Secret Romance. While student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite escapes into stories of passion and danger. Her next-door neighbor,...

"An epic reimagining of the life of Margaret Fuller--America's first feminist and the pioneering journalist who inspired a generation of writers and activists. Young, brazen, beautiful, and unapologetically brilliant, Margaret Fuller accepts an invitation from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the celebrated Sage of Concord, to meet his coterie of enlightened friends. There she becomes "the radiant genius and fiery heart" of the Transcendentalists, a role model...

Story of the fiercely independent Janie Crawford and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose.

Sherif "Sheero" Abdallah is an NYU student reveling in independence, free from the judgmental gaze of his conservative family in Egypt to indulge in all sorts of pleasures. When the FBI comes knocking on his door, he's convinced it's a case of mistaken identity--until they show him a picture of his cousin Amir. Amir has perpetrated a horrific attack and Sheero is suddenly forced to return to Cairo and confront the events that led to their wildly different...

"1906 bestseller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page." --Amazon.com

"After years of hard work in a factory outside of Santiago, Chile, Ramaon accepts a peculiar job: to look after a Coca-Cola billboard located by the highway. And it doesn't take long for Ramaon to make an even more peculiar decision: to make the billboardhis new home. Twelve-year-old Miguel is enchanted by his uncle's unusual living arrangement, but the neighborhood is buzzing with gossip, declaring Ramaon a madman bringing shame to the community....

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...