Gifty is a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even...

A dangerous accident prompts a family's relocation to a gothic seaside house, the site of an infamous murder 15 years earlier, where a wife-and-mother struggling with depression investigates rumors about the killer's parole. --

There's something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. At forty she spends days unable to get out of bed, and often alienates both strangers and her loved ones with casually cruel remarks. When her husband Patrick-- who has only ever wanted her to be happy-- moves out, she returns to her childhood home: a dilapidated townhouse in a rundown part of London,...

Tillie's husband is away on business, the boxes in her new home aren't unpacked, and the telephone isn't even connected yet. Though she's not due for another month, sudden labor pains force Tillie to reach out to her estranged father for help-- a choice that means facing the painful memories she's been running from since she was a child.

Once an aspiring writer, Olga traded literary ambition for marriage and motherhood; when Mario dumps her after 15 years, she is utterly unprepared. Though she tells herself that she is a competent woman, nothing like the poverella (poor abandoned wife) that mothers whispered about in her childhood, Olga falls completely apart. Routine chores overwhelm her; she neglects her appearance and forgets her manners; she throws herself at the older musician...