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Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia—wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton—is Meri's new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Tom's chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong....

Things go dangerously wrong when a middle-class wife and mother impulsively opens her home to a homeless teen and her tiny baby.

"Mark Firth is a home builder in Howland, Massachusetts in the early 2000s who, after being swindled by a finanical advisor, feels opportunity passing him by. In the paranoid days after 9/11, a New York money manager, Philip Hadi, moves his family to Howland and hires Mark to turn his his house into a "secure location." When Howland's first selectman passes away suddenly, Hadi runs for office, and begins subtly transforming the town in his image....

The Dowells, a wealthy American couple, have been close friends with the Ashburnhams for years. Edward Ashburnham, a first-rate soldier, seems to be the perfect English gentleman, and Leonora his perfect wife, but beneath the surface their marriage seethes with unhappiness and deception. Our only window on the strange tangle of events surrounding Edward is provided by John Dowell, the husband he deceives. Gradually Dowell unfolds a devastating

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"From National Book Award finalist and "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), Charles Baxter, a timely and unsettling new novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears. Brettigan's son, a once promising actor, has gone missing, and despite the fact that his wife, Alma, knows he left on purpose, she has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places, churches,...

Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb very much like its American counterparts, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilization: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. In Arlington Park, men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. It's a world awash

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Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks.)
But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps ...

"Again and again. . . I find myself being a Mrs. Bridge evangelist, telling them that it's a perfect novel, and then pressing copies on them. . . What writing! Economical, piquant, beautiful, true." —Meg Wolitzer, The New York Times
In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate storyteller, artfully crafts a portrait using the finest of details in everyday events and confrontations. The novel is comprised of...

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower's becalmed America has become 1969's lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a

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The saga begins with Soames Forsyte, a successful solicitor who buys land at Robin Hill on which to build a house for his wife Irene and future family. Eventually, the Forsyte family begins to disintegrate when Timothy Forsyte, the last of the old generation, dies at the age of 100.