From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them...

Heather Willette has a good life in Concord, Massachusetts-complete with a husband who runs his own business and a son to take up his mantle one day. But now that her marriage has fizzled out and Ross, her only child, is graduating from college and getting serious with his girlfriend, Heather wonders if that life is the one she really wants. Ready to seek out her own happiness and discover herself again, Heather decides to leave her husband and rent...

"A timely exploration of the fault lines in a community, a school, and a family, as a mother begins to suspect her teenage son of committing a terrible crime"--

"1960, New York City: College student Rita Klein is a pioneering woman in the new field of computer programming when she meets Jacob Nassy, man from the Netherlands who is traumatized by his childhood experience of the Holocaust. 1941, The Hague: Cornelia Vogel is working at the Ministry of Information when a census of Holland's population is ordered by the Germans. When Cornelia learns the census is being used to persecute Holland's Jews, she risks...

"Remy Wadia left India for the United States long ago, carrying his resentment of his mother with him. He has now returned to Bombay to adopt a baby--and to see his elderly mother for the first time in several years. Discovering that she is in the hospital, has stopped talking, and seems to have given up on life, he is struck with guilt for not realizing just how sick she has become. His unexpected appearance and assiduous attention revives her and...

"Eli North is not okay. His drinking is getting worse by the day, his emotional wounds after a deployment to Afghanistan are as raw as ever, his marriage and career are over, and the only job he can hold down is with the local sheriff's department. And that's only because the sheriff is his mother--and she's overwhelmed with small town Shaky Lake's dwindling budget and the fallout from the opioid epidemic. The Northwoods of Wisconsin may be a vacationer's...