This is the story of the Cleary family, who moved to Australia in the early 1900s to work Drogheda, a vast sheep station. Employing on a large canvas that encompasses two world wars and the Great Depression, McCullough lets the main characters take turns telling the story from 1915 to 1969. But the heart of the book is the forbidden love between Meggie -- Fee and Paddy Cleary's only daughter -- and Ralph de Bricassart, the handsome parish priest....

Set in England, covering the time period from the 1920s through World War II, the story examines the wealthy Flyte family through the eyes of Sebastian Flyte's less wealthy school friend Charles Ryder. The novel is a story of faith and disillusionment in a glamorous upper-class world.

Captain Charles Ryder returns to the country estate of Brideshead where he indulges in a sentimental journey that takes him back twenty years to his schoolmates at Oxford and to his memories of the Marchmains.

The author recounts his friendship with a Benedictine monk, from the first encounter between troubled teen and counselor, through years of perfunctory contact, to the renewal of their bond at the end of Father Joe's life.

Richard Russo has celebrated Monica Wood's fiction as 'thoroughly captivating...warm and wise and beautifully written,' and Andre Dubus III praised it as 'luminous and graceful...entertaining yet transcendent.' Any Bitter Thing, Wood's brilliant new novel, is her breakout book, a timely, gripping, and compassionate tale of family, faith, and deeply hidden truths. One of its greatest strengths is its continuous ability to defy expectations.

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Madeleine Blais discusses how her family pulled together after the death of her father and overcame the tragedy.