Adult

When the gorgeous and wealthy Iris charms a famous publisher into offering her a lucrative deal for a 12th-century romance, she offers her downtrodden sister, Joséphine, a deal of her own: Joséphine will write the novel and pocket all the proceeds, but the book will be published under Iris’s name. All is well --- that is, until the book becomes the literary sensation of the season.

Before she became the immortal and haunting Miss Havisham of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, she was Catherine, a young woman with all of her dreams ahead of her. Sent by her father to stay with the Chadwycks, Catherine discovers elegant pastimes to remove the taint of her family's new money. When a charismatic stranger pays her attention, everything --- her heart, her future, the very Havisham name --- is vulnerable.

When Robert Morgan’s novel GAP CREEK was published in 1999, it became an Oprah Book Club Selection and an instant national bestseller. But what of the years that followed? What did the future hold for these memorable characters? THE ROAD FROM GAP CREEK holds the answers to these questions, as Robert Morgan takes us back into their lives, telling their story and the stories of their children through the eyes of their youngest daughter, Annie.

Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, set in a Vermont home and a Florida primate research facility, A BEAUTIFUL TRUTH --- at times brutal, other times deeply moving --- is about the simple truths that transcend species, the meaning of family, the lure of belonging, and the capacity for survival.

It’s 1936 when orphaned 13-year-old Evalina Toussaint is admitted to Highland Hospital, a mental institution in Asheville, North Carolina, known for its innovative treatments for nervous disorders and addictions. Taken under the wing of the hospital’s most notable patient, Zelda Fitzgerald, Evalina witnesses cascading events that lead up to the tragic fire of 1948 that killed nine women in a locked ward, Zelda among them.

Widowed for the second time at age thirty-one Katherine Parr falls deeply for the dashing courtier Thomas Seymour and hopes at last to marry for love. However, obliged to return to court, she attracts the attentions of the ailing, egotistical, and dangerously powerful Henry VIII, who dispatches his love rival, Seymour, to the Continent. No one is in a position to refuse a royal proposal so, haunted by the fates of his previous wives---two executions, two annulments, one death in childbirth---Katherine must wed Henry and become his sixth queen.

At the pinnacle of a soaring career in the U.S. Army, Lt. Col. Mark M. Weber was tapped to serve in a high-profile job within the Afghan Parliament as a military advisor. Weeks later, a routine physical revealed stage IV intestinal cancer in the thirty-eight-year-old father of three. When Weber realized that he was not going to survive this final tour of combat, he began to write a letter to his boys, so that as they grew up without him, they would know what his life-and-death story had taught him. This book is that letter. And it’s not just for his sons. It’s for everyone who can use the best advice a dying hero has to offer.

Almost 10 years have passed since Julia Win came back from Burma, her father’s native country. Though she is a successful Manhattan lawyer, her private life is at a crossroads: her boyfriend recently left her, she has suffered a miscarriage, and she is unhappy with her professional life. One day, she hears a stranger’s voice in her head that causes her to leave the office without explanation. In the following days, her crisis only deepens. Not only does the female voice refuse to disappear, but it starts to ask questions Julia has been trying to avoid. Why do you live alone? To whom do you feel close? What do you want in life? Interwoven with Julia’s story is that of a Burmese woman named Nu Nu who finds her world turned upside down when Burma goes to war and calls on her two young sons to be child soldiers.

Mary Bet, the youngest of nine children, was born the same year that the first railroad arrived in their county. As she matures, against the backdrop of Reconstruction and rapid industrialization, she must learn to deal with the deaths of her mother and siblings, a deaf and damaged older brother, and her father’s growing insanity and rejection of God.

College professor Andy Waite is picking up the pieces of a shattered life. Between his research in evolutionary biology and caring for his young daughters, his days are reassurringly safe, if a bit lonely. But when Melissa Potter --- charismatic, unpredictable and devout --- asks him to advise her study of intelligent design, he agrees. Suddenly, the world that Andy has fought to rebuild is rocked to its foundations.