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Reverend John Ames is dying in 1956 in Gilead, Iowa, and he in recording his family's story. Glory Boughton has returned to care for her dying father and soon her brother, Jack, the prodigal son, comes home, too.

Marilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowa -- the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack -- and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson's fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead's Presbyterian minister, and...

In Mildred Pierce, noir master James M. Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devasting emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.
Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses:...

The troubled relationship between two brothers--Arthur Dunn, the dutiful eldest son, and the mercurial, dangerous Jake--escalates when they are both drawn to a beautiful young woman.

Chaos erupts in the Rubinstein household when Olympia's twin daughters are invited to New York's most exclusive debutante ball--with one twin and Olympia's current husband refusing to attend, and the other young woman and Olympia's snobbish ex-husband already shopping for the event.

Told in two voices, Ashish's friends Pinky and Samir pretend to date during a summer at Cape Cod to achieve their individual goals--especially to get their respective mothers off their backs.

Jean Wright is a widow in a small New England city and the owner of a venerable glassworks company. When a tragic car accident robs her of a loved one, Jean must put aside her grief to raise the surviving child, the one-year-old Guin, as her own. As the child blossoms into an independent young woman, the two generations clash. When guin defies the only mother she's ever known by striking out on her own--pursuing a completely different kind of career,...

"It's been 25 years since Gus and Monica left England to start a new life in Spain, building a vineyard and wine business from the ground up. However, when Gus suffers a stroke and their idyllic Mediterranean life is thrown into upheaval, it's left to their three grown-up children in London to step in . . . Sebastian is busy running his company with his wife, Anna, who's never quite seen eye-to-eye with her mother-in-law. Katie, a successful solicitor...

Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation.

Ruth loves to bake cakes. She sees it as an outward manifestation of an inner need to nurture her family-- which is a good thing, because all of a sudden that family is rapidly expanding. First her mother, and then her father, moves in-- they just happen to hate each other with a deep and poisonous emotion reserved only for life-long enemies. Add to ths mix two teenagers, a suddenly unemployed husband, and a physical therapist with the instincts...