"When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days, decades years earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she'd been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? Astrid's youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give...

"The Frosts are a typical American family. Barb and John, married almost fifty years, are testy and bored with each other . . . who could blame them after all this time? At least they have their daughters -- Barb's favorite, the perfect, brilliant Juliet; and John's darling, the free-spirited Sadie. The girls themselves couldn't be more different, but at least they got along, more or less. It was fine. It was enough. Until the day John had a stroke,...

"Lisa Hudson feels more alive than she has in a long time after hiring hunky carpenter Mack Whitney to renovate her old Nantucket home. There's no denying the spark growing between them--despite the fact that Mack is ten years her junior. But her twentysomething children, Juliet and Theo, on the island for the summer, worry that the new relationship will only lead to Lisa's heartbreak. Yet Juliet and Theo are in for tangled love stories all their...

"Jodi Bishop is a top-notch real estate agent. Jodi's father, Vic, is a very controlling man. His wife, Audrey, developed Parkinson's and Vic retired to devote himself to her care. Exhausted from trying to balance her career and her parents' needs, Jodi interviews housekeepers to help care for Audrey and Vic, settling on Elyse Woodley, a widow in her early sixties. While Vic is initially resistant, he soon warms to Elyse's sunny personality and engaging...

In the follow-up to Laurie Gelman's Class Mom, brash, lovable Jen Dixon is back with a new class, and has her work cut out for her. If you've ever been a room parent or school volunteer, Jen Dixon is your hero. She says what every class mom is really thinking, whether in her notoriously frank emails or standup-worthy interactions with the micromanaging PTA President and the gamut of difficult parents. Luckily, she has the charm and wit to get away...

Intimidated by a rich new bachelor who has arrived at her Seaside bed-and-breakfast, Cass, who is caring for her teenage niece and nephew as well as her aging parents, tackles a local mystery while helping her guest recover from his anxiety in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

"Your wife is killed by a cashew (anaphylactic shock), but there isn't time to grieve because your toddler son is always at your heels--wanting to be fed, to be played with, or to sleep next to you all night long. A change of pace seems necessary, so you decide to visit your parents in order to attend your twenty-year high school reunion. What begins as a weekend getaway quickly becomes a theater for dealing with the past--a past that you will have...

How do we take stock of a life--by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh's radical use of time and his mysterious disappearance from the art world,...