"When Roy meets Betty, a wealthy widow online, he can hardly believe his luck. Just like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, Roy is a con man who lives to deceive--and everything about Betty suggests she's an easy mark. He's confident that his scheme to swindle her will be a success. After all, he's done this before. Sure enough, Betty soon lets Roy move into her beautiful home, seemingly blind to the web of lies he's woven around her. But who is Roy,...

At Fault (1890) is a novel by American author Kate Chopin. Published at the author's expense, At Fault is the undervalued debut of a pioneering feminist and gifted writer who sought to portray the experiences of Southern women struggling to survive in an era decimated by war and economic hardship. Thérèse Lafirme is a Creole widow whose husband's death has made the Place-du-Bois plantation on the Cane River in northwestern Louisiana her sole responsibility....

Democracy: An American Novel (1880) is a novel by Henry Adams. Published anonymously, Democracy: An American Novel draws on Adams' experience as a political journalist in Washington, DC who worked to expose corruption in American government. Although fictional, the novel is viewed as a commentary on the presidential administrations of the 1870s and political atmospheres surrounding each. "For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot...

The pettiness of an English seaside town. It is described by Florence Green, a middle-aged widow who buys a house for a bookshop, something the town has not had for over a century. Leading her enemies is Mrs. Gamart who wanted the house for an arts center.

This novel provides an examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Stark and penetrating, it's an exploration of psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing.

"Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of AFTERLIFE, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her husband, Sam suddenly dies. And then more jolt: her big-hearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves--lines from her...

Helen of Pasadena is down but not out when the death of her philandering husband forces to start over.

Accepting a last-minute teaching position in a small Alaska fishing town, Bean finds herself unexpectedly falling in love and marrying, only to become widowed and paired up with an aging, kleptomaniac mother-in-law.

When a man dies and leaves behind a wife and a mistress, we expect certain responses to follow. But as the narrator of Salley Vickers's second novel explains, "this is not an account of feminine jealousy, or even revenge, and not all human beings (not even women) conform to the attitudes generally expected." Indeed, in this ironic and witty novel nothing is quite as we expect to find it. Telling the story of Bridget Hansome and Frances Slater, Vickers...

When two very different women stop to help a stranger in trouble, the two women are drawn together by their love of knitting, and the two women help each other overcome grief and loss as their friendship grows.