Looking back at a tragic event that occurred during his thirteenth year, Frank Drum explores how a complicated web of secrets, adultery, and betrayal shattered his Methodist family and their small 1961 Minnesota community.

"For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He will retain most of his consciousness, memories, and intellect, but his physical body will gradually turn into a great white shark. As Lewis develops the features and impulses of one of the most predatory creatures in the ocean, his complicated artist's heart struggles to make peace with his unfulfilled dreams....

On a rainy New Year's Day, Elsie heads out to pick up a pizza for one. When she meet the adorable and charming Ben Ross, their chemistry is instant and electric. Within weeks, the two are head over heels in love. By May, they've eloped. Only nine days later, Ben is out riding his bike when he is hit by a truck and killed on impact. At the hospital, Elsie must face Susan, the mother-in-law she has never met-- and who doesn't even know she exists. Interweaving...

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become...

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that author Judy Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going...

Some hearts beat only about 412 million times. Which might sound like a lot. But the truth is, it barely even gets you twelve years. Suzy Swanson has always known things that others don't. She can explain the sleep patterns of ants. She knows there are 150 million jellyfish stings on the planet every year. She knows that the average middle school kid contains about 20 billion of Shakespeare's atoms. But she can't understand how Franny Jackson's lifetime...

"Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his--or any other--generation. Its hero is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty--even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine grace....

"In [his earlier book] 'Making Toast', Roger Rosenblatt shared the story of his family in the days and months after the death of his thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Amy. Now, in 'Kayak Morning', he offers a personal meditation on grief itself. 'Everybody grieves,' he writes. From that terse, melancholy observation emerges a work of art that addresses the universal experience of loss. On a quiet Sunday morning, two and a half years after Amy's death,...

"Seconds passed; minutes. She could hear movement now in the waiting room she had just left...it was the metal magazine rack she was sure, that crashed to the tile floor. Then quiet. She strained to hear in the darkness. Nothing more, and then... The air moved in the room and she knew. He was here."
As a young psychology student, Hailey Dean's world explodes when Will, her fianc, is murdered just weeks before their wedding. Reeling, she...

As he grieves his best friend Benny's death, Mason and his friend Calvin, who are targeted by the neighborhood bullies, create an underground haven for themselves, but when Calvin goes missing Mason finds himself in trouble.