Oscar Hijuelos was fascinated by the 37-year friendship between famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley. So he began researching and writing a novel that used the scant historical record of their relationship as a starting point for a more detailed fictional account. It was a labor of love for Hijuelos, who worked on the project for more than 10 years and was still revising the manuscript the day before his sudden passing in 2013. The resulting novel blends correspondence, memoir and third-person omniscience to explore the intersection of these Victorian giants in a long-vanished world.

DEAR MR. YOU renders the singular arc of a woman’s life through letters Mary-Louise Parker composes to the men, real and hypothetical, who have informed the person she is today. Beginning with the grandfather she never knew, the letters range from a missive to the beloved priest from her childhood to remembrances of former lovers to an homage to a firefighter she encountered to a heartfelt communication with the uncle of the infant daughter she adopted.

In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco’s parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of the world goes to war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family’s Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart as Ichimei and his family are declared enemies and forcibly relocated to internment camps run by the United States government.

Felicia Day is a violinist, filmmaker, Internet entrepreneur, compulsive gamer, hoagie specialist, and former lonely homeschooled girl who overcame her isolated childhood to become at least semi-influential in the world of Internet geeks and Goodreads book clubs. She moved to Hollywood to pursue her dream of becoming an actress and was immediately typecast as a crazy cat-lady secretary. But her misadventures in Hollywood led her to produce her own web series, own her very own production company, and become an Internet star.

When Rory McGovern’s husband, Blake, loses his dream job, he announces that he feels like “taking a break” from being a husband and father. Without him, her only hope is to accept a full-time position working for two twenty-somethings. These girls think they know it all and have been given the millions from venture capitalists to back up their delusion: that the future of digital media is a high-end “lifestyle” site --- for kids! Can Rory learn to decipher her bosses’ lingo, texts that read like license plates, and arbitrary mandates? And is there any hope of saving her marriage?

Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. She is married off to a widower with three children to save her father’s business. When her husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Frédérick, arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects all of her family --- including her favorite son, who will become one of the greatest artists of France.

Three very different people find themselves bound together by need and torn apart by blind obsessions and conflicting goals: Henry “Schuler” Jefferson, son of German immigrants from Midwestern farm country; Cora Rose Haviland, a young woman of privilege whose family has lost their fortune; and Charles “Gil” Gilchrist, an emotionally damaged WWI veteran pilot. Each one holds a secret that, if exposed, would destroy their friendship. But their journey of adventure and self-discovery has a price --- and one of them won’t be able to survive it.

Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's family in England.

When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad’s leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can’t bear children. But as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.

Lottie Wilkinson, Rose Arbuthnot, Caroline Dester and Beverly Fisher each decide to take a break from their current lives to spend time at Hopewell Cottage, an old, pretty cottage on a small island. When they arrive, they are transformed by the salt air, the breathtaking views, and the long, lazy days. Gradually, the ladies begin to open up: to one another and to the possibilities of lives quite different from the ones they’ve been leading. Change can’t be that hard, can it?