What happens when a family nearing its breaking point takes in a troubled child? 11 year old Hannah spends only a week with the Nyland family, but they soon discover that she may be more balm than burden and that the only thing harder than taking Hannah in may be letting her go. [From back cover]

"For more than 700 years, the vast, rambling Trelawney Castle in Cornwall--turrets, follies, a room for every day of the year, four miles of corridors and 500,000 acres--was the magnificent and grand "three dimensional calling card" of the Earls of Trelawney. By 2008, it is in a complete state of ruin due to the dulled ambition and the financial ineptitude of the twenty-four earls, two world wars, the Wall Street crash, and inheritance taxes. Still:...

"A novel about a close-knit theater community in Memphis and one turbulent, transformative production of King Lear"--

The Whitbys: a dynasty akin to the Astors, once enormously wealthy real-estate magnates who were considered "the landlords of New York." There was a time when the death of a Whitby would have made national news, but when the family patriarch, Roger, dies, he is alone. Word of his death travels from the longtime family lawyer to his clan of children (from four separate marriages) and the news isn't good. Roger has left everything to his twenty-one-year-old...

Three sisters congregate at the family home on Nantucket Island for the summer as the middle sister faces personal and professional crisis and the woman renting the guest house may have her sights on their widowed father.

Eve Smart is immediately suspicious of Amber, a thirtysomething woman who shows up on Eve and her husband Michael's front porch and talks her way into the family's life, but as Eve and Michael begin to view their life through Amber's eyes, they make some startling realizations about their so-called perfect family.

In this tale, the author taps into the unease that was bubbling under the surface of life in America in the 1980s. It shows the beautifully and unsettling wisdom that children often possess, as well as the surprising ways in which families fracture and re-form. In sunny Southern California in 1988, 8 year old Nenny's parents divorce, and her mother remarries a man with 2 kids of his own. In this unfamiliar configuration, Nenny's natural anxieties...

When art restorer and would-be artist Emily Price surprises herself by accepting a marriage proposal from Chef Benito Hillam, she follows him home to Italy, where Benito's father takes her under his wing when she has difficulty adjusting.

When Ginny and William Owen's three adult children are moved by fate to return home at the same time over the course of a summer, the couple's quiet life is suddenly replaced by the chaotic work of being parents to a house full of children with adult problems.

In this book the author creates an atmosphere of tension and foreboding through her picture of a family and a small society in a state of moral crisis. In a typical small town in Indiana, an apparently normal family struggles to cope with the father's born-again Christian conversion. The younger son embraces the same fundamentalist moral convictions, causing irreconcilable differences between the teenage siblings. The church, taking a role in the...