In old age, Daisy Goodwill attempts to tell her life story as she struggles to understand her place in her own life.

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two World Wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding--sometimes cruelly - succeeding generations to the place that made them.

Alice McDermott's powerful new novel wittily captures the social, political and spiritual upheavals of the mid-twentieth century through the story of a family, and the changing world in which they live. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother lags behind, until he finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Clare, the youngest child of...

"Bella Winter is homeless and jobless. The mother of a toddler by a man whose name she didn't quite catch, her once pretty face is now marred by a scar from a car accident. She's recently disentangled herself from a selfish and indifferent boyfriend and a cruel and indifferent mother. But she shares a quality common to Barbara Comyns's heroines: a bracingly unsentimental ability to carry on. It's not long before Bella has found not only a job but...

"All the Acorns on the Forest Floor tells the poignant and moving stories of multiple characters linked by their experiences as mothers, daughters, and lovers. Rife with stunning imagery, masterful character development, and heart rendering storytelling, this book will captivate readers of all walks of life"-- Provided by publisher.

When an explosion rips through the nearly empty cafeteria of a Reesburgh (Pa.) Elementary School, lunch mother Rose McKenna leads two girls to safety before racing to rescue her own daughter, Melly. But Rose soon learns that she may face both civil and criminal charges for her heroics because one of the girls she saved was seriously injured in the resulting fire that killed three school staff members.

A man haunted by the death of his brother and a forty-year-old secret returns to his Tennessee hometown in this novel by the author of A Question of Mercy. A novel of homecoming, loss, and the power of story, Familiar Ground follows the return of Jacob Bechner to rural Sweetwater, Tennessee, summoned by Callie, a dying woman nearly one hundred years old. Jacob aims to confront a moment of violence from forty years in his past that cost him the...

A powerful tale that follows the lives of a black family and their friends living in a Michigan city. In 1931, Macon Dead III, later nicknamed Milkman, is prematurely brought into the world, the first black child born in Mercy Hospital, just after his mother witnesses the brief flight of a man determined to fly from the cupola of the hospital. Although the novel revolves around Milkman, the stories spun out from him embrace a wide variety of characters...

Eighty-two-year-old Frederick Fife, kind at heart, is desperately lonely, broke and on the brink of homelessness until a case of mistaken identity lands him in a nursing home where he learns about the man’s past and how he can return to a life in better condition than he found it.

Mary Beth Latham is first and foremost a mother, whose three teenaged children come first, before her career as a landscape gardener, or even her life as the wife of a doctor. Caring for her family and preserving their everyday life is paramount. And so, when one of her sons, Max, becomes depressed, Mary Beth becomes focused on him, and is blindsided by a shocking act of violence.