Ruth Wariner was the 39th of her father’s 42 children. After Ruth’s father is brutally murdered by his brother in a bid for church power, her mother remarries. In need of government assistance and supplemental income, Ruth and her siblings are carted back and forth between Mexico and the United States, where Ruth’s mother collects welfare and her stepfather works a variety of odd jobs. As she begins to doubt her family’s beliefs and question her mother’s choices, Ruth struggles to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her determination to forge a better life for herself.

When Rob Roberge learns that he's likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he’s terrified by the prospect of becoming a walking shadow. In a desperate attempt to preserve his identity, he sets out to (somewhat faithfully) record the most formative moments of his life. But the process of trying to remember his past only exposes just how fragile the stories that lay at the heart of our self-conception really are. As LIAR twists and turns through Roberge’s life, it turns the familiar story of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll on its head.

Seven years ago, carefree college student Flora Dane was kidnapped while on spring break. For 472 days, she learned just how much one person can endure. Miraculously alive after her ordeal, she has spent the past five years reacquainting herself with the rhythms of normal life. When Boston detective D. D. Warren is called to the scene of a crime --- a dead man and the bound, naked woman who killed him --- she learns that Flora has tangled with three other suspects since her return to society. Is Flora a victim or a vigilante?

Anna Forster, in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease at only 38 years old, resides in Rosalind House, an assisted living facility. There, she meets fellow resident Luke, and a relationship develops between the two. When Eve Bennett is suddenly thrust into the role of single mother, she finds herself putting her culinary training to use at Rosalind House. When she meets Anna and Luke, she is moved by the bond the pair has forged. But when a tragic incident leads Anna's and Luke's families to separate them, Eve finds herself questioning what she is willing to risk to help them.

Thirteenth-century Bohemia is a dangerous place for a girl, especially one as odd as Mouse, born with unnatural senses and an uncanny intellect. When young King Ottakar shows up at the Abbey wounded by a traitor's arrow, Mouse breaks church law to save him and then agrees to accompany him back to Prague as his personal healer. Caught in the undertow of court politics at the castle, Ottakar and Mouse find themselves drawn to each other as they work to uncover the threat against him and to unravel the mystery of her past.

Unmoored by her mother’s death and feeling her father to be an increasingly distant figure, Katherine Carlyle abandons the set course of her life and starts out on a mysterious journey to the ends of the world. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scène for a courageous leap to true empowerment.

Once upon a time, in a world just like ours, there came “the time of the strangenesses.” A simple gardener began to levitate, and a powerful djinn raised an army composed entirely of her semi-magical great-great-great-grandchildren. A baby was born with the ability to see corruption in the faces of others. The ghosts of two philosophers, long dead, began arguing once more. And a battle for the kingdom of Fairyland was waged throughout our world for 1,001 nights --- or, to be more precise, for two years, eight months and 28 nights.

For 14 years, Letty Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her mother raised her children in their tiny apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty’s parents are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the first time in her life. She comes up with a plan to help the family escape the dangerous neighborhood and heartbreaking injustice that have marked their lives. But one wrong move could jeopardize everything she’s worked for and her family’s fragile hopes for the future.

Sent to a “therapeutic community” for autism at the age of 11, Todd Aaron, now in his 50s, is the “Old Fox” of Payton LivingCenter. A joyous man who rereads the encyclopedia compulsively, he is unnerved by the sudden arrivals of a menacing new staffer and a disruptive, brain-injured roommate. His equilibrium is further worsened by Martine, a one-eyed new resident who has romantic intentions and convinces him to go off his meds to feel “normal” again. Undone by these pressures, Todd attempts an escape to return “home” to his younger brother and to a childhood that now inhabits only his dreams.

Rachel Rabinowitz is confronted with her dark past when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrews Home and her patient is none other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Mildred Solomon, who subjected her to X-ray treatments that left her disfigured as a child. Rachel becomes obsessed with making Dr. Solomon acknowledge, and pay for, her wrongdoing. But each passing hour Rachel spends with the old doctor reveals to Rachel the complexities of her own nature.