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...

Two families awaiting the arrival of their adopted infant daughters from Korea meet at the airport. The families lives become interwined after the Donaldsons, a young American couple invite the Yazdan's, Maryam, her son and his Iranian American wife to an arrival party, which becomes an annual event. Maryam, who came to this country thirty-five years earlier, feels her values threatened when she is courted by a newly widowed Donaldson. A penetrating...

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...

When genealogist Torie O'Shea gets an invitation from her favorite aunt, Sissy, to come and spend some time with her in Minnesota she jumps at the chance. She piles her husband and her father-in-law into the car, leaving her two daughters in the care of her mother back home in Missouri, and hits the road, looking forward to some relaxation and some family bonding. Once they arrive, Torie finds out that her aunt's invitation was not so innocent: Sissy...

"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...

Kristin Eikaas has her hopes set on a new life in America. The year is 1848, and Kristin Eikaas has traveled from Norway to Wisconsin with dreams of a new life. But when she arrives, she finds one disappointment after another. Worse, her superstitious uncle now believes that his neighbor's Oneida Indian wife has put a curse on Kristin. Everyone knows the Sundbergs put spells on people... Everyone except Kristin. Her run-ins with Sam Sundberg only...