Georgia longs for a baby, but she has had miscarriage after miscarriage since her daughter was born more than a decade ago. Through a miraculous egg donation, Georgia is thrilled to find herself pregnant --- until she makes a startling discovery that changes her mind about how much she really wants the baby.

In the coming centuries, the world's population has exploded and covered the earth with cities, animals are nearly all gone, and drought has taken over so that cloudy water is issued by the quart. It is an unwelcoming world for an orphan like Nadia Stepan, who grows up dreaming of the vacation spot called Lighthouse Island, in a place called the Pacific Northwest. She becomes obsessed with it and is determined to somehow find her way there.

Software prodigy Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do. When an Egyptian library invites her to visit as a consultant, her jealous sister Judith persuades her to go. But in Egypt’s postrevolutionary chaos, Josie is abducted --- leaving Judith free to take over Josie’s life at home, including her husband and daughter, while Josie’s talent for preserving memories becomes a surprising test of her empathy and her only means of escape.

When Helen Honeycutt falls in love with Emmet Justice, a charismatic television journalist who has recently lost his wife in a tragic accident, their sudden marriage creates a rift between her new husband and his oldest friends, who resent Helen’s intrusion into their tightly knit circle. Someone is clearly determined to drive her away, but who wants her gone, and why? When she stumbles on the secret behind her predecessor’s untimely death, Helen must decide if she can ever trust --- or love --- again.

Over the years, Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus have faced a number of tough challenges at home and on the job. Consumed by chasing serial killers and psychopaths, they never forgot their first priority: raising their close-knit family and sustaining the bonds of love, devotion and trust that define their marriage. But two very different cases will challenge their most heartfelt beliefs and lead them to reevaluate everything they hold dear.

This latest volume of tales by the bestselling author of THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE features characters who pursue connections through love, sex and family, including a golden-haired girl who appears in an orchard to apple-eating attendants, a woman who cannot resume normal life after sharing a fantasy with her husband, and an unattractive woman who stays with her ogre husband after he accidentally eats their children.

Leon Leyson (born Leib Lezjon) was only 10 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and his family was forced to relocate to the Krakow ghetto. Ultimately, it was the generosity and cunning of one man named Oskar Schindler who saved Leon’s life, and the lives of his mother, his father, and two of his four siblings, by adding their names to his list --- a list that became world-renowned: Schindler’s List.

Cold and poverty define Hanna Renström’s childhood in northern Sweden, and in 1904 she boards a ship for Australia. But none of her hopes --- or fears --- prepares her for the life she will lead. As Hanna’s story unfurls over the next several years in this “treacherous paradise,” she wrestles with a devastating loneliness and with the racism she is meant to unthinkingly adopt.

Chloe walks into a bar and blows five years of sobriety. When she wakes, she finds herself in an unfamiliar world, The Wasteland. She discovers that people from all times and places have also arrived there, including a brother and sister from the Wild West, a prohibition bootlegger, a one-time hippie, a mentally unbalanced 1950s housewife, and a former carnival artist. None know why they arrived there --- or if there is a way out of a world populated by monsters and filled with corruption.

“Bean” Holladay and her sister, Liz, are left to fend for themselves when their mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself. The girls decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that has been in Charlotte’s family for generations. When school starts in the fall, it’s Bean who easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn. And then something happens to Liz.