Nestled in New York's Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity: organic meals, private fitness trainers, daily massages--and all of it for free. In fact, you're paid big money to stay here--more than you've ever dreamed of. The catch? For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds; your movements are monitored, and you are cut off from your former life while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby. Jane, an immigrant...

Dear Mother and Father, After all those years, I was certain Jakob Hirsch had forgotten me. Then came his proposal of marriage. With more impulse than wisdom, I crossed the ocean to begin a new life with him in Shadow Creek, Idaho. Little did I dream of the changes eleven years had brought to the man I once loved-which included three small children waiting with him at the station. I will not marry a stranger who no longer loves me, but I have agreed...

"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester Prynne...

Set in contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man is being unearthed, The bonesetter's daughter is an excavation of the human spirit : the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief. Over the course of one fog-shrouded year, between one season of falling stars and...

"'Your husband is a landowner,' they told her. 'Food and clothing is so plentiful, it grows on trees. 'You will be able to go to school.' Of the three lies the matchmaker told Willow before she left home as a picture bride in 1918, the third hurt the most. Never one to be deterred, Willow does all that she can to make the best of her unexpected circumstance. But it isn't long before her dreams for this new life are shattered, first by a husband who...

"The story of two refugee families and their hope and resilience as they fight to survive and belong in America The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees has been central to America's identity for centuries--yet America has periodically turned its back at the times of greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the twenty-first century American dream, having won...

"Living in Brixton and awaiting the return of her husband and young son from Nigeria, Obiajulu Ejiofor received shattering news. There had been a fatal car crash, and one of them was dead. In Where the Children Take Us, Obiajulu's daughter, Zain Asher, tells the story of her family and her mother's deeply personal fight to protect her children from the daily pressures of poverty, crime, and racism in 1980s and '90s South London as a widowed emigrant....

Larry McMurtry has gained international fame for his eccentric characters and vivid settings. The Wandering Hill is part of a series as colorful as the American West. An eccentric family of English sportsmen have traveled to America to hunt buffalo and other big game. As they spend the winter at a remote trading post, bizarre adventures and even stranger domestic affairs befall them.

Irish-born detective and Vasser graduate Molly Murphy is hired to find out the truth about her friend's missionary parents' deaths and her loss of inheritance. Another Vasser grad has a philandering husband to track. Set in early 20th-century New York City.