It's the mid-1950s and Margot Thornsen is growing up between a Park Avenue apartment in New York and her family's sumptuous Oyster Bay estate as the presumed heir to her late grandfather's steel fortune. Her domineering mother has charted a course for her--to forego education and marry well--but Margot is more interested in microscopes and beetles and books. When a devastating fire brings the family legacy crashing down and the sexual revolution dawns,...

In her second year of studies at Merlin College, Oxford, Sophie Marshall is feeling alienated among fellow students who fail to welcome a woman to their ranks. So when her husband Gray is invited north as a visiting lecturer at the University in Din Edin, they leap at the chance. There, Sophie's hunger for magical knowledge can finally be nourished. But soon, Sophie must put her newly learned skills to the test.

Working at a homeless shelter, Laurel Estabrook encounters Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of secret photos, but when Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel embarks on an obsessive search for the truth behind the photos.

University sophomore Miwako Sumida has hanged herself, leaving those closest to her reeling. In the months before her suicide, she was hiding away in a remote mountainside village, but what, or whom, was she running from? To Ryusei, a fellow student at Waseda; Chie, Miwako's best friend; and Fumi, Ryusei's older sister, Miwako was more than the blunt, no-nonsense person she projected to the world. Heartbroken, Ryusei begs Chie to take him to the village...

"Margot is dead. There's a rumor she died because she couldn't take the pressure of being a pledge. You may not ask what happened to her. It's not your business. But it wasn't a suicide, if you're wondering. Spring Fling will not be cancelled. The deposit is non-refundable. And Margot would have wanted the sisterhood to continue in her absence, if only to protect her sisters secrets: Shannon is the thinnest girl in the house (the other sisters hate...

"Afraid of losing her parents at a young age--her father with his weak heart, her deeply depressed mother--Naomi Feinstein prepared single-mindedly for a prestigious future as a doctor. An outcast at school, Naomi loses herself in books, and daydreams of Wellesley College. But when Teddy, her confidant and only friend, abruptly departs from her life, it's the first devastating loss from which Naomi is not sure she can ever recover, even after her...

"Cadence 'Cady' Archer arrives on Harvard's campus searching for answers about her brother, a schizophrenic genius who leapt from his dorm room window the year before. Eric's brilliance overshadowed Cady growing up, but she worshipped and adored him--even as he became more unstable, retreating deeper into his secretive work on multidimensional spacetime and isolating himself from everyone around him. Losing Eric has left a black hole in Cady's life,...

A young Irish drama student in 1990s London makes new friends, establishes a place for herself, and seeks to shed her plain-girl identity before entering a whirlwind affair with an older man who changes her in unexpected ways.