Kate and Zoe met at 19 when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cycling. They are built to exploit the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals. Now at 32, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.

Eleanor Hart had made a brilliant marriage in New York, but it ended in a scandalous divorce and 30 days in rehab. Now she finds that she will still need a husband to be socially complete. However, through one misstep after another, Ellie mishandles her second act. Her options narrow and future prospects contract, until she faces a desperate choice.

Two sisters and the cousin they grew up with after a tragedy are summoned home to their family matriarch's inn for a shocking announcement. When they join the innkeeper and the other guests for weekly Movie Night --- it's Meryl Streep month --- they find themselves sharing secrets and questioning everything they thought they knew about life, love and one another.

Recently back from the war in Europe, Charlie Beale shows up in the quiet town of Brownsburg, Virginia. His job at the local butcher shop gives him the opportunity to meet all the townsfolk, including a beautiful teenage bride. Ultimately, Charlie’s obsession with Sylvan Glass threatens to destroy everything and everyone in its path.

Adam Newman has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both 16, and now they are finally planning to marry. But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia. And when Rachel’s younger cousin moves home, Adam starts questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence.

Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a 15-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a 36-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Young Louise is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever.

Alice Buckle sees herself as a wife, mother, drama teacher, Facebook chatter, downloader of memories and Googler of solutions. Then an anonymous online study called “Marriage in the 21st Century” shows up in her inbox. She becomes Wife 22 and is assigned a caseworker (Researcher 101). Along the way, she shares her innermost thoughts and secrets in this survey, and her confessions end up making some sparks fly.

In two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey’s latest novel, an automaton --- in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life --- will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of creation, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

When 15-year-old Dell Parsons' mother and father rob a bank, his sense of a happy, knowable life is forever shattered. Undone by the calamity of his parents' criminal actions and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew.

Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town that he’s hated all his life.