Even if others abandon you, you must never abandon yourself. This simple truth became Terry Helwig’s lifeline as she was forced to grow up too soon. Terry grew up the oldest of six girls in the big-sky country of the American Southwest, where she attended 12 schools in 11 years. Helwig’s stepfather, Davy, a good-hearted and loving man, proudly purchased a mobile home to enable his family to move more easily from one oil town to another, where Davy eked out a living in the oil fields.

For all fifteen years of her life, Pauline de Pamiers has witnessed an attack on her family, friends, and faith. It's the early thirteenth century and the Pope and King of France are conducting a Crusade against the Cathars; the only crusade on European soil and against another Christian sect. As a member of this sect in France that sits outside the dominant Roman Church, Pauline is an outsider: young, but independent and bold.

Therese Wolley is a mother who has made a promise. She works as a secretary, shops for groceries on Saturdays, and takes care of her two girls. She doesn’t dwell on the fact that her girls are fatherless, mostly because her own father abandoned her before she was born and she has done just fine without him. Even though her older daughter regularly wakes with nightmares and her younger one whispers letters under her breath, she doesn't shift from her resolve that everything will be fine.

Molly has arrived home from Vassar to reveal that she has an important announcement to make. Her mother, Suzanne, is convinced that Molly’s news is history repeating herself and that she’s about to become a thirty-six-year-old grandmother. Suzanne’s mother, Ava, develops a case of impending great-grandmother fever that is, when she’s not spying on the new next-door neighbor, Buddy McKinley, who turns out to be a blast from her past.

There is always a before and an after...Sophie and Miles have a long marriage, twin daughters, a close-knit circle of friends, and a happy home, until an accusation of inappropriate sexual conduct with a pupil blows everything apart. Sophie knows Miles as her husband of 30 years, the father to their twins, and a dedicated teacher. Could he really be a sexual abuser? Flight Path explores the effect that an accusation of sexual assault has on a family. Guilty or Innocent, nobody wins.

After the tragic death of her son and the seeming collapse of her marriage, Charlotte Napier flees to Portugal in the hopes of finding guidance from her mentor: her mother-in-law, Violet. Instead, she finds solace in the letters of Mariana Alcoforado, a seventeenth-century nun. Charlotte and Mariana's stories may be different in origin, but they share the same inner turmoil. As she reads the letters, Mariana's spiritual journey sheds light on Charlotte's own crisis.

In 1958, 19-year-old Kat Caswell loses her best friend in a brutal accident. In an attempt to flee from her past, she hops a freight train, leaving rural Indiana behind. Kat soon discovers that the extreme danger of train jumping is a welcome distraction from her pain.

From the editor of the award-winning Children of Manzanar, Heather C. Lindquist, and Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara comes a nuanced account of the “Resettlement”: the relatively unexamined period when ordinary people of Japanese ancestry, having been unjustly imprisoned during World War II, were finally released from custody. Given $25 and a one-way bus ticket to make a new life, some ventured east to Denver and Chicago to start over, while others returned to Southern California only to face discrimination and an alarming scarcity of housing and jobs. 

Maeve Maloney may be nearing 80, but she keeps Sea View Lodge as shipshape as her parents did during Morecambe's heyday. But now only her employees recognise the heartbreak hidden beneath her spikiness. Until, that is, Vincent shows up. He is the only man alive to have known her twin sister, Edie. If only Maeve could confront the secret past she shares with Vincent, she might finally see what it means to love and be loved - a lesson that her twin may have been trying to teach her all along.

Zahn can't get the missing girl he found—and the one he can't find—out of his mind. Someone in this mountain valley is collecting children, and Zahn is gradually drawn into the case while still trying to break through to his daughter. Then she disappears too.

When they meet in the 1930s, Doris and Tup’s love is immediate. They marry quickly and Doris commits to the only life Tup ever wanted: working the Senter family farm. Soon their first child, Sonny, is born and Doris and Tup understand they are blessed. More children arrive - precocious, large-hearted Dodie and quiet, devoted Beston - but Doris and Tup take nothing for granted. When an unimaginable tragedy turns the family of five into a family of four, everything the Senters held faith in is shattered.

Adnan leads a weary existence as a bookshop owner in modern-day, war-torn Baghdad, where bombings, corruption, and assault are everyday occurrences and the struggle to survive has suffocated the joy out of life for most. But when he begins to clean out his bookshop of 40 years to leave his city in search of somewhere safer, he comes across the story of Ali, the Gardener of Baghdad.

From a working-class family, Scotsman Andrew Cunningham stewards for wealthy travelers aboard elegant cruise ships of the early 20th century, but he resents those who flaunt their inherited wealth. New Yorkers Florence and Bradley Cumings, first-class passengers traveling aboard Titanic, are the exception, and the three discover an ancestral connection. As the ship sinks on the fateful morning of April 15, 1912, Florence watches in horror from her lifeboat.

Fourteenth-century Europe. The Black Death has killed half the known world, and in an isolated convent, a small group of nuns spends their days in work, austerity, and devotion, chanting the Liturgy of the Hours. But their community is threatened. Rumors of heresy and a scandalous Book of Ursula, based on the teachings of the charismatic former abbess and founder of the order, have prompted the male church hierarchy to launch an investigation. Disrespect and rebellion infect some novices, and the youngest among them pines for the bishop's chief inquisitor.

It’s the summer of 2017 in Wellington Beach, California, a suburban coastal town increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing prices—divisions that change the lives of five neighbors as they search for home and community in a neighborhood where no one can agree who belongs.