In these short stories from the award-winning author of THE PAST, it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly. Each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists.

For the first time in four years, physician Bess Codman visits Cliff House, the compound her great-grandparents built almost a century before. But due to erosion, the once-grand home will soon fall into the sea. It’s not just memories of her family home Bess must face, though, but also an old love that might hold new possibilities. In the midst of packing, Bess rediscovers the forgotten family guest book. Ruby, Bess’ grandmother and primary keeper of the book, always said Cliff House was a house of women, and by the very last day of the very last summer at Cliff House, Bess will understand the truth of her grandmother’s words in ways she never imagined.

Buddhist monk Wayan Bagus lost his island of solitude and wants to get it back. The island was about 200 miles northeast of Samoa. It had a mountain, beaches, a rain forest and a volcano. And now it’s gone. Vanished without a trace. Brilliant and boyishly charming Emerson Knight likes nothing better than solving an unsolvable, improbable mystery. When clues lead to a dark and sinister secret that is being guarded by the National Park Service, Emerson will need to assemble a crack team for help. Since a crack team isn’t available, he enlists Riley Moon and his cousin Vernon. Together, this ragtag, mismatched trio will embark on a worldwide investigation that will expose a conspiracy 100 years in the making.

When Miss Norma was diagnosed with uterine cancer, she was advised to undergo surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. But instead of confining herself to a hospital bed for what could be her last stay, Miss Norma --- newly widowed after nearly seven decades of marriage --- rose to her full height of five feet and told the doctor, “I’m ninety years old. I’m hitting the road.” And so Miss Norma took off on an unforgettable around-the-country journey in a 36-foot motor home with her retired son Tim, his wife Ramie, and their dog Ringo. With each passing mile (and one educational visit to a cannabis dispensary), Miss Norma’s health improves and conversations that had once been taboo begin to unfold.

Before Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, she thinks her position is clear. The child of two lawyers, she is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley’s face flashes on the screen as she reviews old tapes, she is overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Shocked by her reaction, she digs deeper and deeper into the case. As Alexandria pores over the facts of the murder, she finds herself thrust into the complicated narrative of Ricky’s childhood. And by examining the details of Ricky’s case, she is forced to face her own story, to unearth long-buried family secrets, and reckon with a past that colors her view of Ricky's crime.

After his mother's death, 11-year-old Marcus moves in with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there 30 years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life. The islanders call it "Grief Cottage," because a boy and his parents disappeared from it during a hurricane 50 years before. While Aunt Charlotte is in her studio painting, Marcus visits the cottage, building up his courage by coming ever closer, even after the ghost of the boy who died seems to reveal himself. He courts the ghost boy, never certain whether the ghost is friendly or follows some sinister agenda.

The remote Irish village of Duneen has known little drama, and yet its inhabitants are troubled: Sergeant P.J. Collins hasn’t always been this overweight; Brid Riordan, a mother of two, hasn’t always been an alcoholic; and elegant Evelyn Ross hasn’t always felt that her life was a total waste. So when human remains --- suspected to be those of Tommy Burke, a former lover of both Brid and Evelyn --- are discovered on an old farm, the village’s dark past begins to unravel. As a frustrated P.J. struggles to solve a genuine case for the first time in his professional life, he unearths a community’s worth of anger and resentments, secrets and regrets.

Maddy is a devoted stay-at-home wife and mother. She is the cornerstone of her family, a true matriarch...until she commits suicide, leaving her husband Brady and teenage daughter Eve heartbroken and reeling. As they sift through details of her last days, trying to understand the woman they thought they knew, Brady and Eve are forced to come to terms with unsettling truths. Maddy, however, isn’t ready to leave her family forever. Watching from beyond, she tries to find the perfect replacement for herself. Will the mystery of Maddy ever come to rest? And can her family make peace with their history and begin to heal?

In 1913, the restless world sat on the brink of unimaginable suffering. But for one woman, the darkness of a new era had already made itself at home. Isadora Duncan would come to be known as the mother of modern dance, but in the spring of 1913 she was a grieving mother, after a freak accident in Paris resulted in the drowning death of her two young children. The accident cracked Isadora’s life in two: on one side, the brilliant young talent who captivated audiences the world over; on the other, a heartbroken mother spinning dangerously on the edge of sanity.

In Paris in the year 1899, Marcel Després is arrested for the murder of his wife and transferred to the famous Salpetriere Asylum. The doctor assigned to his care soon realizes this is no ordinary patient: Marcel Després, Mister Memory, is a man who cannot forget. And the policeman assigned to his case soon realizes that something else is at stake: For why else would the criminal have been hurried off to the hospital, and why are his superiors so keen for the whole affair to be closed? This crime involves something bigger and stranger than a lovers' fight, something with links to the highest and lowest establishments in France. The policeman and the doctor between them must unravel the mystery, but the answers lie inside Marcel's head.

Private investigator Aimée Leduc is walking through Saint-Germain when she is accosted by Suzanne Lesage, a Brigade Criminelle agent on an elite counterterrorism squad. Suzanne has just returned from the former Yugoslavia, where she was hunting down dangerous war criminals for the Hague. Back in Paris, Suzanne is convinced she’s being stalked by a ghost --- a Serbian warlord her team took down. She’s suffering from PTSD and her boss thinks she’s imagining things. She begs Aimée to investigate; is it possible Mirko Vladić could be alive and in Paris with a blood vendetta?

Harit, a lonely Indian immigrant in his mid-40s, lives with his mother, who can no longer function after the death of Harit’s sister, Swati. In a misguided attempt to keep both himself and his mother sane, Harit has taken to dressing up in a sari every night to pass himself off as his sister. Meanwhile, Ranjana, also an Indian immigrant in her mid-40s, has just seen her only child, Prashant, off to college. Worried that her husband has begun an affair, she seeks solace by writing paranormal romances in secret. When Harit and Ranjana’s paths cross, they begin a strange yet necessary friendship that brings to light their own passions and fears.

On an early April afternoon, a bomb goes off in the Islamic Cooperation Council’s offices in Oslo, killing 23 people. The Police and Security Service suspect an extremist organization to be responsible for the attack, a suspicion that grows stronger when threats of yet another, bigger explosion during the planned celebration of the Norwegian constitution reach the authorities. Hanne Wilhelmsen is approached by her long-lost friend, Billy T., whose son Linus has undergone some disturbing changes recently. As the mood of the city darkens, Hanne tries to help Billy T. reach out to Linus and realizes that Oslo is up against forces far more terrible and menacing than ever before.

The powerful forces of science and family collide when geneticist Paige Robson finds her world in upheaval: Her eight-year-old son, Miles, is struggling to fit in at his new school and begins asking questions about his biological father that Paige can’t answer --- until fate thrusts the anonymous donor she used into their lives. Paige’s carefully constructed life begins to unravel as the truth of Miles’ paternity threatens to destroy everything she has grown to cherish. As Paige slowly opens herself up, she realizes that breakthroughs aren’t only for the lab. But when tragedy strikes, she must face the consequences of sharing a secret only she knows.

In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen chronicles the secrets and scandals of Quintus Pompeius’ villa, culminating with his narrow escape from the lava and ash of Vesuvius. “Abroad” captures the low point of an artist couple’s tumultuous European road trip, trapped in a remote Spanish farmhouse and forced to paint a family mural and pitch in with chores to pay for repairs to their broken-down car. Other stories in Penelope Lively’s first story collection in decades reveal friends and lovers in fateful moments of indiscretion, discovery and even retribution --- as in “The Third Wife,” when a woman learns her husband is a serial con artist and turns a house-hunting trip into an elaborately staged revenge trap.

When Claire walks in on her husband canoodling with their realtor, her seemingly perfect life comes crashing down. But how can she move on when she’s still stuck in the orbit of her husband’s world? For starters, she can get rid of her soon-to-be ex’s possessions by dumping them onto the curb…until complaints from the neighbors get the police involved. Now Claire is busy dodging the mean mommies at story hour and hiding from her ex-husband’s girlfriend in the grocery store. But as Claire soon learns, suburbia still has a few surprises in store for her --- surprises that will make her question her choices from the past, send her down an unexpected road to self-discovery, and maybe even lead to new love.

John F. Kennedy and his young warriors invented modern presidential politics. They turned over accepted wisdom that his Catholicism was a barrier to winning an election and plotted a successful course to that constituency. The last-minute invitation to Lyndon B. Johnson for vice president in 1956 surprised them only because they had failed to notice that he wanted it. They invented The Missile Gap in the Cold War and out-glamoured Richard Nixon in the TV debates. Now acclaimed, award-winning journalists Tom Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie provide the most comprehensive account, based on a depth of personal reporting, interviews and archives.

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

It’s been a year since Billie Flanagan went on a solo hike in Desolation Wilderness and vanished from the trail. Her husband and teenage daughter have been coping with Billie’s death the best they can: Jonathan drinks as he works on a loving memoir about his marriage; Olive grows remote, from both her father and her friends at the all-girls school she attends. But then Olive starts having strange visions of her mother, still alive. Jonathan worries about Olive’s emotional stability, until he starts unearthing secrets from Billie’s past that bring into question everything he thought he understood about his wife. Together, Olive and Jonathan embark on a quest for the truth.

For the past 30 years, Mr. and Mrs. Jha's lives have been defined by cramped spaces, cut corners, gossipy neighbors, and the small dramas of stolen yoga pants and stale marriages. They thought they'd settled comfortably into their golden years, pleased with their son’s acceptance into an American business school. But then Mr. Jha comes into an enormous and unexpected sum of money, and moves his wife from their housing complex in East Delhi to the super-rich side of town, where he becomes eager to fit in as a man of status. The move sets off a chain of events that rock their neighbors, their marriage, and their son, who is struggling to keep a lid on his romantic dilemmas and slipping grades, and brings unintended consequences.