"In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, gather to play mah jong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. United in unspeakable loss and new hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. . . . Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, memories that reveal these women's strength, worries, and determination, which their American-born daughters reject as irrelevant. The daughters, in turn, recall pivotal moments...

"Devastated by the sudden death of her mother--a quiet, loving and intensely private Southern seamstress called Miss Mabel, who overflowed with pearls of Ozarks wisdom but never spoke of her own family--Sutton Douglas makes the impulsive decision to pack up and head north to the Michigan resort town where she believes she'll find answers to the lifelong questions she's had about not only her mother's past but also her own place in the world. Recalling...

". . .'To the Lighthouse' is the story of a woman and her family experiencing the passage of time and seeking to recapture meaning from the flux of things. Though Mrs. Ramsay's death is the event on which the novel turns, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory which is a celebration of domestic life and its intimate, trivial details. But, through the character of Mrs. Ramsay's friend Lily Briscoe, Virginia Woolf's....

"Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed. The narrator, a writer, recalls all that...

"As the secrets of the O'Neill family are brought to light, Her Mother's Shadow explores how the dark corners of the past can be illuminated by the hope that truth brings." --Page [4] cover.

"In 1972, on Mudas Summers' seventeenth birthday, her beloved Mama, Ella, is found hanging from the rafters of their home. Most people in Peckinpaw, Kentucky, assume that Ella's no-good husband did the deed. Others think Ella grew tired of his abuse and did it herself. Muddy is determined to find out for sure either way, especially once she finds strange papers hidden amongst her mama's possessions. But Peckinpaw keeps its secrets buried deep. Muddy's...

"In the fall of 1957, Olivia McAlister is living in Opelika, Mississippi, caring for her two girls, June and Grace, and her husband, Holly. She dreams of living a much larger life--seeing the world and returning to her wartime job at a landing boat factory in New Orleans. As she watches over the birds in her yard, Olivia feels like an accidental'--a migratory bird blown off course. When Olivia becomes pregnant again, she makes a fateful decision,...

Everyone in King George, New Hampshire, loved Margaret Batten-part-time amateur actress, full-time wallflower-and single mother to a now distant daughter, Sunny. But accidents happen, and the death of Margaret, side by side with her putative fiance, brings Sunny back to the scene of her unhappy adolescence, to the community that remembers her solely, nervously, as the girl who golfed. Reentry is to be dreaded; there's no hiding in a town with one...

Rachel Fleischer has good reasons not to be at her father's deathbed. Foaling season is at hand and her horses are becoming restless and difficult. Her critical mother and grasping sister could certainly handle Marty Fleisher's resistance better without her. But Malachi, her eighty-something horse managermore father to her than Marty has ever beenconvinces Rachel she will regret it if she doesn't go. When a stranger at her father's funeral delivers...

Ana finds herself transported to a dreamlike and dangerous land where she joins an army of girls engaged in a never-ending war along a rugged coast where the women lure men to their deaths at sea via radio transmissions, like twentieth-century sirens. Though she finds strength in this exhilarating world, she comes to realize that she's not the killer they want her to be.