She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can't get the girl out of her head... Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and...

"Patty and Walter Berglund were the pioneers of old St. Paul--the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, they have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter, once an environmental lawyer, taken a job working with Big Coal? Most startling of all, why has Patty, the perfect neighbor, turned into the...

"A collection of seven short-stories the examines how suicide, divorce, infidelity, infertility, and lies affect several middle-class, Northeastern American families in the late 20th century"--Provided by publisher.

A young girl faces the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister. As her parents drift toward their own risky consolations, thirteen-year-old Nico is left alone to grope toward understanding and clarity, falling into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's enigmatic boyfriend. Over one haunted summer, Nico must face that life-changing moment when children realize their parent can no longer help them. She learns about...

A major literary event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modern literature - the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births...

When Fernando and Marie decide to dedicate themselves full time to various political causes, their nine-year-old daughter, Anna, must learn to face the world on her own.

The story of a middle-class British family and their struggle to survive during WWII. Adapted from Jan Struther's book. Kay Miniver doesn't fly a Spitfire in dogfights over London or ply the North Sear in a battlefield, but she's doing her all for wartime England. And she does it so well that Winston Churchill would say Mrs. Miniver was more vital to the nation than a fleet of destroyers.