At 35, Mika Suzuki is at the lowest point of her life when she receives a phone call from Penny, the daughter she placed for adoption 16 years ago. Penny is determined to forge a relationship with her birth mother; in turn, Mika longs to be someone Penny is proud of. Faced with her own inadequacies, Mika embellishes a fact about her life. What starts as a tiny white lie slowly snowballs into a fully fledged fake life. The harder-won heart belongs to Thomas Calvin, Penny’s adoptive widower father. What starts as a rocky, contentious relationship slowly blossoms into a friendship and, over time, something more. But can Mika really have it all --- love, her daughter, the life she’s always wanted --- or will her deceptions ultimately catch up to her?

Thirteen years have passed since England surrendered to the Nazis and formed a Grand Alliance with Germany. It was forced to adopt many of its oppressive ideologies, one of which was the strict classification of women into hierarchical groups based on the perceived value they brought to society. Rose Ransom, a member of the privileged Geli class, works for the Ministry of Culture, rewriting the classics of English literature to ensure there are no subversive thoughts that will give women any ideas. Outbreaks of insurgency have been seen across the country, and suspicion has fallen on Widowland, the run-down slums where childless women over 50 have been banished. Rose is given the dangerous task of infiltrating Widowland to find the source of the rebellion.

Smarting from her recently canceled wedding and about to turn 40, Laurie Sassalyn returns to her Maine hometown of Calcasset to handle the estate of her great-aunt Dot, a spirited adventurer who lived to be 93. Alongside boxes of Polaroids and pottery, a mysterious wooden duck shows up at the bottom of a cedar chest. Laurie’s curiosity is piqued, especially after she finds a love letter to the never-married Dot that ends with the line “And anyway, if you’re ever desperate, there are always ducks, darling.” Laurie is told that the duck has no financial value. But after it disappears under suspicious circumstances, she feels compelled to figure out why anyone would steal a wooden duck --- and why Dot kept it hidden away in the first place.

Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living. As Washington’s former poet laureate, that’s how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental health struggles into her art. But when her five-year-old daughter exhibits similar behavior and begins remembering things from the lives of their ancestors, Dorothy believes the past has truly come to haunt her. Through an experimental treatment designed to mitigate inherited trauma, Dorothy intimately connects with past generations of women in her family. As painful recollections affect her present life, she discovers that trauma isn’t the only thing she’s inherited. A stranger is searching for her in each time period --- a stranger who’s loved her through all of her genetic memories.

Hannah Brooks looks more like a kindergarten teacher than somebody who could kill you with a wine bottle opener. Or a ballpoint pen. Or a dinner napkin. But the truth is, she’s an Executive Protection Agent (aka "bodyguard"), and she just got hired to protect superstar actor Jack Stapleton from his middle-aged, corgi-breeding stalker. When Jack’s mom gets sick, he comes home to the family’s Texas ranch to help out. There's only one catch: He doesn’t want his family to know about his stalker. Or the bodyguard thing. And so Hannah --- against her will and her better judgment --- finds herself pretending to be Jack’s girlfriend as a cover. But the more time she spends with Jack, the more real it all starts to seem.

It begins quietly on a balmy Southern night as some locals gather at Bo Peep’s, one of the town’s favorite watering holes. Within an hour, however, a man will be murdered and his companion will be “disappeared.” An unlikely detective, Morgana Musgrove, doyenne of Savannah society, is called upon to unravel the mystery of these crimes. Morgana is an imperious, demanding and conniving woman, whose four grown children are weary of her schemes. But one by one she inveigles them into helping with her investigation, and soon the family uncovers some terrifying truths --- truths that will rock Savannah’s power structure to its core.

Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem. After a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won't give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father. For 10 years, she's run from the town that never understood her, and it feels like nothing has changed. Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is.

When Paris Peralta is arrested in her own bathroom --- covered in blood, holding a straight razor, her celebrity husband dead in the bathtub behind her --- she knows she'll be charged with murder. With the unwanted media attention now surrounding her, it's only a matter of time before someone from her long-hidden past recognizes her and destroys the new life she's worked so hard to build. Twenty-five years earlier, Ruby Reyes was convicted of a similar murder in a trial that riveted Canada in the early ’90s. Reyes knows who Paris really is, and when she's unexpectedly released from prison, she threatens to expose all of Paris' secrets. Left with no other choice, Paris must finally confront the dark past she escaped.

As a politician, Emma has sacrificed a great deal for her career --- including her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, Flora. A former teacher, the glare of the spotlight is unnerving for Emma, particularly when it leads to countless insults, threats and trolling as she tries to work in the public eye. Fourteen-year-old Flora is encountering heartless bullying. When another teenager takes her own life, Emma lobbies for a new law to protect women and girls from the effects of online abuse. Now, Emma and Flora find their personal lives uncomfortably intersected…but then the unthinkable happens. A man is found dead in Emma’s home. A man she had every reason to be afraid of and to want gone.

April Clarke-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford. Vivacious, bright, occasionally vicious and the ultimate It girl, she quickly pulled Hannah into her dazzling orbit. Together, they developed a group of devoted and inseparable friends --- Will, Hugh, Ryan and Emily --- during their first term. By the end of the year, April was dead. Now, a decade later, Hannah and Will are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing April, former Oxford porter John Neville, has died in prison. Relieved to have finally put the past behind her, Hannah’s world is rocked when a young journalist comes knocking and presents new evidence that Neville may have been innocent.