Sarah Quinlan's husband, Jack, has been haunted for decades by the untimely death of his mother when he was just a teenager, her body found in the cellar of their family farm, the circumstances a mystery. The case rocked the small farm town of Penny Gate, Iowa, where Jack was raised, and for years Jack avoided returning home. But when his beloved aunt Julia is in an accident, hospitalized in a coma, Jack and Sarah are forced to confront the past that...

Terry Painter enjoys her quiet life in tranquil Delray, Florida, where the single, forty-year-old nurse lives alone in the house she inherited from her mother. When young, vibrant Alison Simms rents the cottage on her property, the two women strike up a fast friendship -- and Terry is swept into a fantastic new life: dinners out, shopping, makeovers, even flirting with the handsome son of one of her elderly patients. But nothing about her newfound...

"On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attentions, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. But her gift is no blessing, for her mother - her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother - tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food...

Meet Faye, Shirley, Marilyn, and Alice: four women with skills, smarts, and secrets--all feeling over the hill and out of the race. But in a moment of delicious serendipity, they meet and realize that they share more than raging hormones and lost dreams. Now, as sex, and men are discussed with double servings of chocolate cake, they vow to help one another...and themselves.--Cover p. [4].

As onetime classmates meet up over the course of a weekend for a fortieth high school reunion, they discover things that will irrevocably affect the rest of their lives. For newly divorced Dorothy Shauman, the reunion brings with it the possibility of finally attracting the attention of the class heartthrob, Pete Decker. For the ever self-reliant, ever left-out Mary Alice Mayhew, it's a chance to reexamine a painful past. For Lester Heseenpfeffer,...

When she discovers that her sister Roxy, who was kicked out of the house by their father eight years earlier, has become a high-priced New York call girl, Emmie sets out to spy on her sister and learn more about her life.

Lindsay and Kerrie Ann are sisters who have known hardship from an early age, when their mother was sent to prison and they were separated and sent into foster care. Thirty years later, Lindsay is still trying to reconnect with her little sister. When they are finally reunited , neither sister's expectations are met. Kerrie Ann feels intimidated by the "classy," more educated Lindsay, while Lindsay is dismayed by Kerrie Ann's streetwise ways. They...

Layken and Will have managed to overcome the obstacles that threatened to destroy their love, proving that they are indeed destined for one another. But what they are about to learn, however, is that the things that have brought them together may be the very things that ruin their connection forever. Layken is left second-guessing the relationship whilst Will is jumping over hurdles to prove his love for her. What the young lovers discover about themselves...

When four women meet in a hot tub at a spa, they realize they share a common problem--toxic relatives--and a common solution--each other.

A runaway wife leaves one domestic situation, only to fall into another. She is Delia Grinstead, 40, of Baltimore, the wife of a physician and mother of three. One day she decides she's had enough of being invisible, moves to another town and gets herself a job--caring for a boy whose mother has abandoned the family. By the author of Saint Maybe.