Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at 52 she finds herself staring into "the Mids" --- that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation. When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life --- and her family --- as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother and a daughter in a country that is coming apart at the seams.

INNOCENTS AND OTHERS is about two best friends who grow up in LA in the ’80s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common --- except their views on sex, power, movie-making and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone. Jelly is older, erotic and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.

National Book Award nominee Dana Spiotta has written a fascinating and intrepid novel about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create, in isolation, at the margins of our celebrity-based culture.