Cheryl is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people’s babies. She is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women’s self-defense nonprofit where she works. She believes they’ve been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one. When Cheryl’s bosses ask if their 21-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl’s eccentrically ordered world explodes.

Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, has evolved ever since her hit single "Respect," amidst personal tragedy, surprise Grammy performances and career reinventions. Again and again, Aretha stubbornly finds a way to triumph over troubles, even as they continue to build. Her hold on the crown is tenacious, and in RESPECT, David Ritz gives us the definitive life of one of the greatest talents in all American culture.

Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don’t care about books the way they did back in Iran, Azar Nafisi energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite American novels, Nafisi invites us to join her as citizens of her “Republic of Imagination,” a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

One mastectomy, two C-sections, three pants sizes and lots of red lipstick later, Geralyn Lucas --- the author of WHY I WORE LIPSTICK TO MY MASTECTOMY --- is dealing with the same issues as other women her age. When she looks in the mirror at her hard-won wrinkles, all she wants is Botox. Celebrating her sweet 16 cancerversary, she’s thankful for her second chance and ready to be daring. But can she survive life’s new ups and downs with the same courage she’s always had?

At 75, Florence Gordon has earned her right to set down the burdens of family and work and shape her legacy at long last. But just as she is beginning to write her long-deferred memoir, her son Daniel returns to New York from Seattle with his wife and daughter, and they embroil Florence in their dramas, clouding the clarity of her days and threatening her well-defended solitude. And then there is her left foot, which is starting to drag….

Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her --- a canyon “as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove that nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. And then there’s John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past.

The only Terrebonne who made it out, Alma thought she was done with Montana. But an unexpected call from the local police takes the successful lawyer back to her provincial hometown and pulls her into the family trouble she thought she’d left far behind: Her lying, party-loving sister, Vicky, is dead. When she returns home to bury Vicky and see to her orphaned niece, she discovers that the death may not have been an accident.

Twenty-two-year-old Charlie Wong grew up in New York’s Chinatown, the older daughter of a Beijing ballerina and a noodle maker. Now grown, she lives in the same tiny apartment with her widower father and 11-year-old sister. But when she lands a job as a receptionist at a ballroom dance studio, Charlie gains access to a world she hardly knew existed, and everything she once took to be certain turns upside down.

After she is forced to flee Afghanistan in 2007, Deborah Rodriguez moves to a seaside town in Mexico. Despite having no plan, no friends and no Spanish, a determined Rodriguez soon finds herself swept up in a world where the music never stops and a new life can begin. Her adventures and misadventures among the expats and locals help lead the way to new love, new family, and a new sense of herself.

Paul O'Rourke is a Manhattan dentist with a thriving practice. But he is a man made of contradictions, and his biggest fear is that he may never truly come to understand anybody, including himself. When someone begins impersonating Paul online, his quest to learn why his identity has been stolen forces him to confront his troubled past and his uncertain future in a life disturbingly split between the real and the virtual.