"When Sonya MacTavish inherits the huge mansion on the coast of Maine, she has no idea the house is haunted. The footsteps she hears at night, the doors slamming, the music playing are not figments of her imagination. And when she has visions of an antique mirror, she is drawn to it, sensing it holds dark family secrets. Then one night the mirror appears and Sonya glides through this looking glass, into the past--and sees a bride murdered on her wedding...

"A deeply evocative portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a daring visionary who created an inimitable legacy in American art and transformed the city of Boston itself. By the time Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her Italian palazzo-style home as a museum in 1903 to showcase her collection of old masters, antiques, and objects d'art, she was already well-known for scandalizing Boston's polite society. But when Isabella first arrives in Boston in 1861,...

"My Favorite Half-Night Stand is a laugh-out-loud romp through online dating and its many, many fails. Millie Morris has always been one of the guys. A UC Santa Barbara professor, she's a female-serial-killer expert who's quick with a deflection joke and terrible at getting personal. And she, just like her four best guy friends and fellow professors, is perma-single. So when a routine university function turns into a black tie gala, Mille and her...

"Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream...

"The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O'Leary's life. He can't manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he's living out of a suitcase, and he's homesick. When the team's owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he's ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he's already on thin ice, so he has no choice...

"Having arrived at a certain age (her prime), Ann Leary casts a wry backward glance at a life spent trying -- and often failing -- to be nice. With wit and surprising candor, Leary recounts the bedlam of home bat invasions, an obsession with online personality tests, and the mortification of taking ballroom dance lessons with her actor husband. She describes hilarious red-carpet fiascos and other observations from the sidelines of fame, while also...

"The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the...

"The roadmap for finding purpose, meaning, and success as we age, from bestselling author, Harvard professor, and the Atlantic's happiness columnist, Arthur Brooks. Many of us assume that the more successful we are, the less susceptible we become to the sense of professional and social irrelevance that often accompanies aging. But the truth is, the greater our achievements and our attachment to them, the more we notice our decline, and the more painful...

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses--though curbed by...

"Oona Kelly Webster has much to be grateful for. A striking woman with red hair and green eyes, she has a loving family and a job she adores. To celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she and her husband Charles have planned a visit to France. But then Charles drops a bombshell. He has been living a lie--hiding an affair for a year--and he is leaving Oona for a younger male lover. Although devastated, Oona decides to travel to France without...