"Alicia Berenson's life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house overlooking a park in one of London's most desirable areas. One evening, her husband, Gabriel, returns home late from work, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face and then never speaks another word. Alicia's refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander,...

Jane, a plain and penniless orphan in nineteenth-century England, accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall and soon finds herself in love with her melancholy employer, Mr. Edward Rochester, a man with a terrible secret.

"Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright... Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University,...

"From a distance, Michael and Joleen Zarkades seem to have it all: a solid marriage, two exciting careers, and children they adore. But after twelve years together, the couple has lost their way; they are unhappy and edging toward divorce. Then the Iraq war starts. An unexpected deployment will tear their already fragile family apart, sending one of them deep into harm's way and leaving the other at home, waiting for news. When the worst happens,...

Emigrating from Bohemia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, with her family, Antonia discovers no white-framed farmhouse or snug barn. Instead, the cultured Shimerda family finds itself huddled in a primitive sod house buffeted by the ceaselessly blowing winds on the Midwest prairie. For her childhood friend Jim Burden, Antonia comes to embody the elemental spirit of this frontier. Working alongside men, she survives without compromising the rich, deep power...

"Nothing could be more out of character, but after fifty-nine years of marriage, as her husband Bernard's health declines and her friends' lives become focused on their grandchildren--which Jenny never had--Jenny decides she wants a little something for herself. So she secretly applies to be a contestant on the prime-time TV show Britain Bakes. Whisked into an unfamiliar world of cameras and timed challenges, Jenny delights in a new-found independence....

A young bride is brought by her new husband to his manor house in England. There she finds that the memory of her husband's first wife haunts her, and she tries to discover the secret of that mysterious woman's death.

Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can't move. She can't speak. She can't open her eyes. Though she can hear everyone around her, no one knows because she's in a coma. But she doesn't remember what happened. And she has a sneaking suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, the narratives build and collide for an...

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, "old same," in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she's painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower...

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