My name's Griz. My childhood wasn't like yours. I've never had friends, and in my whole life I've not met enough people to play a game of football. My parents told me how crowded the world used to be, but we were never lonely on our remote island. We had each other, and our dogs. Then the thief came. There may be no law left except what you make of it. But if you steal my dog, you can at least expect me to come after you. Because if we aren't loyal to the things we love, what's the point?

At 19, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and chaos: the Ash Family farm. There, she joins an intentional community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can’t untangle. Berie --- now renamed Harmony --- renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear.

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation --- awkward but electrifying --- something life-changing begins. A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world, while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Allie Garvey is heading home to the funeral of a childhood friend, which means seeing the other two people with whom she shares an unbearable secret. Twenty years earlier, a horrific incident shattered the lives of five teenagers, including Allie. They kept what happened a secret, believing that getting caught would be the worst thing that could happen. But Allie has been haunted for two decades by what she and the others did, and by the fact that she never told a soul. The dark secret has eaten away at her, distancing her from everyone she loves, including her husband. Now, Allie stands on the precipice of losing everything. She digs to unearth the truth, but reaches a shocking conclusion that she never saw coming.

Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for 11 months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses --- imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest.

A young woman, S.H., moves to New York City in 1978 to look for adventure and write her first novel, but finds herself distracted by her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite. As S.H. listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, she carefully transcribes the woman’s bizarre monologues about her daughter’s violent death and her need to punish the killer. Forty years later, S.H. stumbles upon the journal she kept that year and writes a memoir, Memories of the Future, in which she juxtaposes the notebook’s texts, drafts from her unfinished comic novel, and her commentaries on them to create a dialogue among selves over the decades. As the book unfolds, you witness S.H. write her way through vengeance and into freedom.

On a remote Scottish island, the McBride house stands guard over its secrets. A century ago, a young widow and her son died mysteriously there. Just last year, a local boy, visiting for a dare, disappeared without a trace. For Zoe Adams, newly arrived from America, the house offers a refuge from her failing marriage. But her peaceful retreat is disrupted by strange and disturbing events: nighttime intrusions, unknown voices, a constant sense of being watched. The locals want her to believe that these incidents are echoes of the McBrides’ dark past. Zoe is convinced the danger is closer at hand, and all too real. But can she uncover the truth before she is silenced?

THE SILK ROAD begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there --- paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The novel also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death.

Mona is 26 and cleans houses for a living in Taos, New Mexico. Her boyfriend, Dark, happens to be married to one of her clients. But Dark and his wife aren’t the only complicated clients on Mona’s roster. There’s also the Hungarian artist couple who --- with her addiction to painkillers and his lingering stares --- reminds Mona of troubling aspects of her childhood, and some of the underlying reasons her life had to be restarted in the first place. As she tries to get over the heartache of her affair and the older pains of her youth, Mona winds up on an eccentric, moving journey of self-discovery that takes her back to her beginnings where she attempts to unlock the key to having a sense of home in the future.

A man is dead, shot three times in his home office. When the cops arrive, his pregnant wife is holding the gun. D.D. Warren arrives on the scene and recognizes the woman --- Evie Carter --- from a case many years back. Evie's father was killed in a shooting that was ruled an accident. But for D.D., two coincidental murders is too many. Flora Dane sees the murder of Conrad Carter on the TV news and immediately knows his face. She remembers a night when she was still a victim --- a hostage --- and her captor knew this man. Overcome with guilt that she never tracked him down, Flora is now determined to learn the truth of Conrad's murder. But D.D. and Flora are about to discover that in this case the truth is a devilishly elusive thing.