Sara Young

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues--gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest--visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences. Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole--local...

"In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother, and Birdy, the victim, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable....

Jerusha Judy Abbott's life is drastically changed one day, when a mysterious and rich benefactor scoops her up from an orphanage-the only home she has ever known and offers to pay her way through college. Her benefactor has many requests, the two most important being that she uses this opportunity to become a writer, and that she writes him monthly to update him on her studies. To maintain his air of mystery, he never responds, and requests that Judy...

Kitty is excited to throw a kitty-corn party but becomes frustrated when newcomer Puppy messes up the decorations, ruins the gift Kitty made, and worst of all, he takes up all of Unicorn's attention.

"New York, 1924. Vivian Kelly's days are filled with drudgery, from the tenement lodging she shares with her sister to the dress shop where she sews for hours every day. But at night, she escapes to The Nightingale, an underground dance hall where illegal liquor flows and the band plays the Charleston with reckless excitement. With a bartender willing to slip her a free glass of champagne and friends who know the owner, Vivian can lose herself in...