Elizabeth and Jackson Shore married young, raised two daughters, and weathered the storms of youth as they built a future together. But after the children leave home, they quietly drift apart. When Jack accepts a wonderful new job offer, Elizabeth puts her needs aside to follow him across the country. Until the sudden death of her father changes everything.

Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard; the other followed a dream and traveled the world to become a famous photojournalist. But when their beloved father falls ill, Meredith and Nina find themselves together again, standing alongside their cold, disapproving mother, Anya, who even now, offers no comfort to her daughters.

For 18 years, Jude Farraday has put her children’s needs above her own, and it shows - her twins, Mia and Zach, are bright and happy teenagers. When Lexi Baill moves into their small, close-knit community, no one is more welcoming than Jude. Lexi, a former foster child with a dark past, quickly becomes Mia’s best friend. Then Zach falls in love with Lexi and the three become inseparable. Jude does everything to keep her kids on track for college and out of harm’s way. It has always been easy - until senior year of high school. Suddenly she is at a loss.

Meghann Dontess is a woman haunted by heartbreak. Twenty-five years ago she was forced to make a terrible choice, one that cost her everything, including the love of her sister, Claire. Now, Meghann is a hotshot divorce attorney who doesn’t believe in intimacy - until she meets the one man who can change her mind.

The Grey sisters had only each other when their mother died years ago. Their father provided for them physically on Water's Edge, the ranch that had been in their family for three generations, each of them however, longed for their father's love.

Thirty-four-year-old Ruby Bridge is a not-too-successful comedienne who uses her mother, a nationally-syndicated "moral and spiritual counselor" as the main fodder for her cynical, rather bitter humor. Her mother Nora, long divorced from Ruby's father, is a woman whose past is just about to catch up with her - in the form of blackmail by a former lover.

In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all - beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn.

Detective Dave Burrows has longed for the top job in the Stock Squad but never thought he'd be acting in that role while his partner and best mate, Detective Bob Holden, is treated for melanoma. Bob is keen to get back on the road and Dave can't wait to go bush either, expecting the trip will be much the same as usual. But the trip doesn't play out that way. Multiple bomb blasts in the small country town of Kallygarn send shock waves through the state of WA, and Dave and Bob are once again drawn into the underworld of crime.

I never expected to have to uproot my family to go live in my parents’ isolated cottage on Lost Lake. It’s twenty miles to the nearest town, an insignificant speck in endless pine forests. Nobody’s lived here for a decade. Now, I pick up a rusty pail from its nest of autumn leaves and turn to my daughter. Suddenly, I recall how I used to help my own mother pick wild strawberries up here as a little girl. Maybe, this isn’t a punishment. Maybe this place will be the making of our family.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time.