" For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice's old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries...

"Explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to...

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Deeply wounded by her embittered mother's lack of sympathy for her aspirations, Elnora finds comfort in the nearby Limberlost Swamp, whose beauty and rich abundance provide her with the means to better her life.

Thrown together in a televised contest, seven unlikely couples--including two flight attendants, born-again Christians, and two former child stars--participate in a reality show in which they scour the globe in search of love and treasure.

The new novel from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Spare and unsparing, "God Help the Child" is a searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the center: a woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love until she told a...

When Leda's daughters leave home to be with their father, she decides to take a trip to a small coastal town in Italy, but soon after she arrives memories from her unsettled past come back to haunt her.

August 2011. Tropical Storm Irene wreaked havoc on Vermont, flooding rivers and destroying homes. New Orleans bartender Vale receives a call and is told that her mother, Bonnie, has disappeared. Beginning her search in the hometown she left eight years earlier, Vale finds herself falling back into the lives of the family she thought she'd left behind--and careening toward a family origin secret more stunning than she ever imagined.

Devon McAllister flees danger with her daughter and ends up in Thunder Point, Oregon, where she meets widowed father Spencer Lawson, a man who can teach her about safety and stability.

Hana suffers from Werner's syndrome, a disease that makes her age twice as fast as normal, so at thirty-eight, she has the appearance of an eighty-year-old, and as her family cares for her, they all must learn to cope with her illness and impending death.