Bethia Mayfield lives among pioneers and Puritans of the 17th century. She yearns for an education, but her gender forbids it. At 12 she encounters Caleb, the Native American son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret friendship. When Caleb goes to Cambridge to study Latin and Greek, Bethia finds herself there too --- but she is indentured as a housekeeper.

When 17-year-old Jamie arrives on the idyllic island of Little Bly to work as a summer au pair, she is stunned to learn of the horror that precedes her. Seeking the truth surrounding a young couple's tragic deaths, Jamie discovers that she herself looks shockingly like the dead girl --- and that she has a disturbing ability to sense the two ghosts. As the secrets of the house wrap tighter around her, Jamie must navigate the increasingly blurred divide between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Imprisoned for decades and nearing the end of his life, the con artist father of young novelist Arthur Phillips reveals a treasure he’s kept secret for half a century: The Tragedy of Arthur, a previously unknown play by William Shakespeare.

In this emotional collection, characters are shattered and remade by loss. A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s disappearance; a mother mourns her teenage son through his favorite music; and a woman reflects on the year her family collapsed.

On a warm September evening in the Millers Kill community center, five veterans sit down in rickety chairs to try to make sense of their experiences in Iraq. What they will find is murder, conspiracy, and the unbreakable ties that bind them to one another and their small Adirondack town.

After their parents divorced, Andre Dubus III and his siblings grew up with their mother in a depressed mill town. Nearby, his father taught on a college campus. In TOWNIE, Dubus shares how he escaped the cycle of violence and bridged the rift between his father and himself.