A heart-wrenching anthology that explores the topic of lost loves and the magical qualities of unexpected second chances. In each story, the author proves that with a resilient spirit, love never truly dies—and, in fact, can be sweeter the second time around.

At 16, Beth Lowe uncovers a life-shattering secret, bringing her sacred summers with her mother abruptly to an end. Now, years later, Beth receives a package containing a scrapbook, a haunting record of a time long forgotten. Suddenly she is swept back to the world she left behind, forced to confront the betrayal that destroyed her --- and to search her heart for forgiveness.

Many stories have been written about journeys at sea, but it is less common to see such a journey combined with a coming-of-age tale. This is exactly what Michael Ondaatje has done in his latest book, THE CAT'S TABLE. This story, though fictional --- and very imaginative--- is drawn from Ondaatje’s own life; he took the very same voyage at the same age. Through a number of characters that our reviewer Harvey Freedenberg calls “colorful and enigmatic,” Mynah begins to learn about how the adult world works. Harvey says the book “is a tale Michael Ondaatje someday was destined to tell. It’s a pleasure for us, his readers, to share in that telling.”

Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a 15-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a 36-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Young Louise is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever.

Nora Keane’s carefully constructed life falls to pieces when she --- along with the rest of the world --- learns that her husband, a prominent Massachusetts attorney general, has been cheating on her. Heartbroken and humiliated, Nora takes refuge with her maternal aunt on Burke’s Island in Maine, a place where superstition and magic are carried on the ocean winds, and wishes and dreams wash ashore with the changing tides.

Kate Crane is a soloist in a celebrated New York City ballet company who is struggling to keep her place in a very demanding world. At every turn she is haunted by her close relationship with her younger sister, Gwen, a fellow company dancer whose career quickly surpassed Kate’s, but who has recently suffered a breakdown and returned home. Alone for the first time in her life, Kate is anxious and full of guilt about the role she may have played in her sister’s collapse.

The author of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS journeys across the country and into the psyche of his son and traveling companion, where he finds not only the remarkable skills and debilities known as savantism, but a host of admirable qualities as well.

Eleanor Hart had made a brilliant marriage in New York, but it ended in a scandalous divorce and 30 days in rehab. Now she finds that she will still need a husband to be socially complete. However, through one misstep after another, Ellie mishandles her second act. Her options narrow and future prospects contract, until she faces a desperate choice.

A young woman unsure of her engagement revisits in memory the events of one scorching childhood summer when her beautiful yet troubled mother spirits her away from her home to an Indian village untouched by time, where she discovers in the jungle behind her ancestral house a spellbinding garden that harbors a terrifying secret.

Isabella, Mary, and Lauren feel like everyone they know is getting married, but among the many celebrations, the girls still have to contend with the problems in their own lives.

Kate and Zoe met at 19 when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cycling. They are built to exploit the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals. Now at 32, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.

Eliot Gordon would do anything for her family. A 38-year-old working mother, she lives an ordinary but fulfilling life in suburban Atlanta with her partner, Grant Delaney, and their three daughters. When Eliot's long-lost first love, appears, it triggers a shocking chain of events that culminates in a split-second decision that will haunt her beloved family forever. How Eliot survives and what she loses in the process is a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved a child. 

Adam Newman has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both 16, and now they are finally planning to marry. But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia. And when Rachel’s younger cousin moves home, Adam starts questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence.

In this moving tale, Kate throws a party for her female friends to celebrate her cancer recovery. Together they strike a bargain: Kate will do something that has always terrified her (white-water rafting) if each woman will accomplish one challenging task Kate chooses for her.

This radical reimagining of one of Shakespeare’s most deeply psychological plays is set in a psychiatric unit in which narrator and acclaimed film, stage and television actor Alan Cumming is the lone patient. Channeling the story of Macbeth, he is inhabited in turn by each of the characters of the drama, including some of Shakespeare’s most complex and troubled creations.

Three generations of women converge on the family beach house in this wickedly funny, emotionally resonant story of love and dysfunction from the author of the bestselling debut novel COMMENCEMENT.

Alexandra Cooper arrives in France to visit her boyfriend and famed restaurateur, Luc Rouget. But she quickly finds herself entangled in the murder of a young woman with only one piece of evidence: a matchbox from Luc’s restaurant. Alex is pulled back to New York for a high-profile case, but finds that the two cases may be connected as another of Luc’s matchboxes appears on the scene.

When Liv Dugan ducks out of work for lunch, it's just an ordinary day. When she returns, she stumbles onto a massacre. All her colleagues at Zuma Software have been shot. Only luck has left Liv unscathed, and that might be running out. Liv suspects the shootings are tied to her past --- and to the package she recently received from her long-dead adoptive mother.

When eighteen year old Grace Carlisle arrives in London in 1914 and fails to get a job as a secretary, she’s afraid she has disappointed her family terribly. She lies to her family when she finds a job as a housemaid on Park Lane and quickly becomes entangled in the lives of the family who lives there, especially Beatrice who is desperate to find a purpose and joins the suffragist movement. The choices both women make connect their chances at future happiness.

“No one believed I was destined for greatness.” So begins Isabella’s story, in C. W. Gortner’s novel about one of history’s most famous and controversial queens --- the warrior who united a fractured country, the champion of the faith whose reign gave rise to the Inquisition, and the visionary who sent Columbus to discover a New World.

On the last night of 1937, 25-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society --- where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve.

Sunny Mann has masterminded a life for herself and her family in a quiet Virginia town. But when a fender bender on an average day sends her coiffed blonde wig sailing out the window, her secret is exposed. As her facade begins to unravel, we discover the singular world of Sunny, an everywoman searching for the perfect life, and Maxon, an astronaut on his way to colonize the moon.

Judith Whitman always believed in a certain kind of love, but she has only experienced it once. Willy Blunt was a carpenter with a dry wit and a steadfast sense of honor, and marrying him seemed like a natural thing to promise. Twenty years later, Judith’s marriage is full of secrets, and she holds the phone number of the man who believed she meant it when she said she loved him.

When 19-year-old Marian Sutro joins the British forces during World War II, her directive is hijacked by another secret organization that wants her to go to Paris to persuade a friend --- a research physicist --- to join the Allied war effort, a mission that could change the course of the war.

Three young friends --- the saint, the sinner and the angel --- grow up together in the sort of small Texas Panhandle town that lives and dies by its Friday night football games. A fateful event casts a long shadow over these three intertwined lives and leaves the reader turning the pages desperately to see how it all plays out.