When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.

Almost 10 years have passed since Julia Win came back from Burma, her father’s native country. Though she is a successful Manhattan lawyer, her private life is at a crossroads: her boyfriend recently left her, she has suffered a miscarriage, and she is unhappy with her professional life. One day, she hears a stranger’s voice in her head that causes her to leave the office without explanation. In the following days, her crisis only deepens. Not only does the female voice refuse to disappear, but it starts to ask questions Julia has been trying to avoid. Why do you live alone? To whom do you feel close? What do you want in life? Interwoven with Julia’s story is that of a Burmese woman named Nu Nu who finds her world turned upside down when Burma goes to war and calls on her two young sons to be child soldiers.

Twelve-year-old Ko Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother, who, for unclear reasons, keeps herself away from her son. Everything changes when Bo Bo discovers the story of his parents’ great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events, and of his mother’s mysterious sickness. Convinced that he can heal her and reunite their family, Bo Bo decides to set out in search of his parents.

Lady Madeleine Jameson, a struggling heiress, arrives at the door of Barrister William Snopes in a last-ditch effort to save her faltering estate. She invested in the acquisition of a merchant brig, the Padget, allowed by a letter of marque from the king's regent to legally capture cargo from French traders operating illegally in the Indian Sea. Yet when the ship returns to the London harbor, it's met by constables and soldiers ready to seize its goods, accusing the sailors of piracy. And the letter proving their legality has disappeared. William Snopes cautiously takes the case. But as he gets deeper into the mystery and prepares for trial, he learns that the forces arrayed against Lady Jameson, and now himself, are even more powerful than he'd imagined.

Thea Mottram is having a bad month. She has been let go from her office job with no notice, and her husband of nearly 20 years has decided to leave her for one of her friends. When she learns that a distant great uncle in Scotland has passed away, leaving her his home and a hefty antique book collection, Thea decides to leave Sussex for a few weeks. Almost instantly, she becomes enamored with the quaint cottage, comforted by its cozy rooms and lovely but neglected garden. The locals are just as warm, quirky and inviting. The only person she can’t seem to win over is bookshop owner Edward Maltravers, to whom she hopes to sell her uncle’s book collection. But bickering with Edward proves oddly refreshing and exciting, leading Thea to develop feelings she hasn’t experienced in a long time.

Elizabeth, Veronica, Rachel and Emily met at Camp Birchwood in 1985, where over four summers they were the Clover Girls --- inseparable for those magical few weeks of freedom --- until the last summer that pulled them apart. Now approaching middle age, the women are facing struggles with their marriages, children and careers. Then Liz, V and Rachel each receive a letter from Emily with devastating news. She implores the girls who were once her best friends to reunite at Camp Birchwood one last time and repair the relationships they’d allowed to sour. But the women are not the same idealistic, confident girls who once ruled Camp Birchwood, and perhaps some friendships aren’t meant to last forever.

A leading British actress hoping to make a splash in America flies to Los Angeles for the grueling gauntlet known as pilot season, a time when every network and film studio looking to fill the rosters of their new shows entice a fresh batch of young hopefuls. Instead, Mia Eliot, a fish out of water in the ruthlessly competitive and faceless world of back-to-back auditioning, discovers the sinister side of Hollywood when she becomes the last person to see Emily, a newfound friend. Standing out in a conveyor-belt world of fellow aspiring stars, Emily mysteriously disappears following an audition, after asking Mia to do a simple favor. But nothing is simple. Nothing is as it seems. And nothing prepares Mia for a startling truth: In a city where dreams really do come true, nightmares can follow.

You just boarded a flight to New York. There are 143 other passengers onboard. What you don’t know is that 30 minutes before the flight, your pilot’s family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight.

Summer is looking forward to a break from hustling for acting work in Manhattan when she, her husband Gabe, and Gabe’s nine-year-old son arrive at the annual family get-together at her in-laws’ sprawling estate. But this year, Gabe’s brother Nick has invited his new flame Hannah, whom Summer immediately recognizes from a few years before. Oddly, her brother-in-law’s girlfriend claims not to know her. Yet she charms the other family members, and after Nick announces that he’s proposed to Hannah, Summer doesn’t have much choice but to grin and bear it. Then the reunion is rocked by tragedy when a family member is found dead. Though the doctors attribute the loss to natural causes, a grieving Summer fears that the too-good-to-be-true Hannah is involved, even as Gabe dismisses her suspicions.

Saskia was a damaged, lonely teenager when she arrived at the lakeside commune called Home. She was immediately taken with Abraham, Home's charismatic leader, and the four other teens who lived there, her best and only friends. Two decades later, Saskia is shuttered in her Connecticut estate, estranged from the others. Her carefully walled life is torn open by threatening letters. Unless she and her former friends return to the land in rural Maine, the terrible thing they did as teenagers --- their last-ditch attempt to save Home --- will be revealed. From vastly different lives, the five return to confront their blackmailer and reckon with the horror that split them apart. How far will they go to bury their secret forever?

Tech millionaire Miles Cookson recently has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and there is a 50 percent chance that it can be passed on to the next generation. Two decades ago, a young, struggling Miles was a sperm donor. Somewhere out there, he has nine kids, and they might be about to inherit both the good and the bad from him. Aspiring film documentarian Chloe Swanson embarks on a quest to find her biological father, armed with the knowledge that 22 years ago, her mother used a New York sperm bank to become pregnant. When Miles and Chloe eventually connect, their excitement at finding each other is overshadowed by a series of mysterious and terrifying events. One by one, Miles’ other potential heirs are vanishing --- every trace of them wiped, like they never existed at all.

Cadence Archer arrives on Harvard’s campus desperate to understand why her brother, Eric, a genius who developed paranoid schizophrenia, took his own life there the year before. Losing Eric has left a black hole in Cady’s life, and while her decision to follow in her brother’s footsteps threatens to break her family apart, she is haunted by questions of what she might have missed. And there’s only one place to find answers. As Cady struggles under the enormous pressure at Harvard, she investigates her brother’s final year, armed only with a blue notebook of Eric’s cryptic scribblings. She knew he had been struggling with paranoia, delusions and illusory enemies --- but what tipped him over the edge?

HOMELAND ELEGIES blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son and the country they both call home. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one --- least of all himself --- in the process.

It’s been nearly six years since Julia Jones had her heart broken. After her husband became involved with another woman, she did everything she could to save their marriage, to no avail. Distraught after selling the family home, Julia moves into a condominium complex and embraces a fulfilling new life, one that doesn’t seem to need a man in it. That is, until she meets Heath Johnson, a handsome new resident in the building’s exercise room, and she can’t help but be drawn to him. As they begin to grow close, their friendship blossoms into an unexpected love. But when a dramatic revelation threatens the happiness they’ve found, Julia and Heath must reconcile their love for their children with their love for each other. If they can’t, their bright future together may be nothing but a dream.

In the summer of 1979, Jackie Pierce spent three months of infinite freedom at her bohemian uncle’s sprawling estate on the California coast. She and her cousin Willa fell into a fast friendship…until the summer abruptly ended in tragedy, and Willa silently slipped away into the night. Twenty years later, Jackie unexpectedly inherits The Sandcastle and returns there to ready it for sale. It turns out that before her estranged aunt’s death, she had promised an up-and-coming producer he could record a tribute album to her late uncle at the property’s studio. When a piece of the past resurfaces and sparks new questions about Willa’s disappearance, Jackie must discover if the dark secret she’s kept ever since is even the truth at all.

It’s 2am on a Saturday night in the spring of 2001, and 28-year-old Cecily Gardner sits alone in a dive bar in New York’s East Village, questioning her life. Feeling lonesome and homesick for the Midwest, she wonders if she’ll ever make it as a reporter in the big city --- and whether she made a terrible mistake in breaking up with her longtime boyfriend, Matthew. As Cecily reaches for the phone to call him, she hears a guy on the barstool next to her say, “Don’t do it --- you’ll regret it.” Something tells her to listen, and over the next several hours --- and shots of tequila --- the two forge an unlikely connection. Then Grant disappears in the chaos of 9/11. Fearing the worst, Cecily spots his face on a missing-person poster, and realizes she is not the only one searching for him. Her investigative reporting instincts kick into action as she vows to discover the truth.

In the wake of a shocking tragedy, Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s charming but financially strapped bookshop in San Francisco. She also becomes caretaker for her ailing grandfather Andrew, who has begun displaying signs of decline. Natalie thinks it’s best to move him to an assisted living facility to ensure the care he needs. To pay for it, she plans to close the bookstore and sell the derelict but valuable building on historic Perdita Street, which is in need of constant fixing. There’s only one problem --- Grandpa Andrew owns the building and refuses to sell. To Natalie’s surprise, her sorrow begins to dissipate as her life becomes an unexpected journey of new connections, discoveries and revelations, from unearthing artifacts hidden in the bookshop’s walls, to discovering the truth about her family, her future and her own heart.

Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team of biologists tasked with reintroducing 14 gray wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie, too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove the sisters out of Alaska. Inti is not the woman she once was either, changed by the harm she’s witnessed. Yet, as the wolves surprise everyone by thriving, Inti begins to let her guard down, even opening herself up to the possibility of love. But when a farmer is found dead, Inti knows where the town will lay blame. Unable to accept that her wolves could be responsible, Inti makes a reckless decision to protect them. But if the wolves didn’t make the kill, then who did? And what will Inti do when the man she is falling for seems to be the prime suspect?

In the dizzying aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Daisy Wilder enlists in a top-secret program, replacing male soldiers in a war zone for the first time. Under fear of imminent invasion, the WARDs guide pilots into blacked-out airstrips and track unidentified planes across Pacific skies. But not everyone thinks the women are up to the job, and the new recruits must rise above their differences and work side by side despite the resistance and heartache they meet along the way. With America’s future on the line, Daisy is determined to prove herself worthy. And with the man she’s falling for out on the front lines, she cannot fail. From radar towers on remote mountaintops to flooded bomb shelters, she’ll need her new team when the stakes are highest.

On a brilliantly sunny July day, six-year-old Ruby is abandoned by her father in the suffocating dark of a Tennessee cave. Twenty years later, transformed into soap opera star Eleanor Russell, she is fired under dubious circumstances. Fleeing to Europe, she marries a glamorous stranger named Orlando Montague and keeps her past closely hidden. Together, Eleanor and Orlando start afresh in LA. Setting up house in a storybook cottage in the Hollywood Hills, Eleanor is cast in a dream role --- the lead in a remake of REBECCA. As she immerses herself in that eerie gothic tale, Orlando’s personality changes, ghosts of her past re-emerge, and Eleanor fears she is not the only person in her marriage with a secret.

Single mom Jess Davis is a data and statistics wizard, but no amount of number crunching can convince her to step back into the dating world. But then she hears about GeneticAlly, a buzzy new DNA-based matchmaking company that is predicted to change dating forever. Her test shows an unheard-of 98% compatibility with another subject in the database: GeneticAlly’s founder, Dr. River Peña. This stuck-up, stubborn man is without a doubt not her soulmate. But GeneticAlly has a proposition: Get to know him and we’ll pay you. Jess is in no position to turn it down, despite her skepticism about the project and her dislike for River. However, she slowly begins to realize that there might be more to the scientist --- and the science behind a soulmate --- than she thought.

Once upon a time, when her dad married Sage’s mom, Daisy was thrilled to get a bright and shiny new sister. But Sage was beautiful and popular, everything Daisy was not, and she made sure Daisy knew it. After the divorce, the stepsisters’ rivalry continued until the final, improbable straw: Daisy married Sage’s first love, and Sage fled California. Eighteen years, two kids and one troubled marriage later, Daisy never expects to see Sage again. But when the little sister they have in common needs them both, they put aside their differences to care for Cassidy. As long-buried truths are revealed, no one is more surprised than they are when friendship blossoms. However, their fragile truce is threatened by one careless act that could have devastating consequences.

After 80-year-old Kathleen has a run-in with an intruder, her daughter wants her to move into a residential home. But she’s not having any of it. What she craves --- what she needs --- is adventure. Liza is drowning in the daily stress of family life. The last thing she needs is her mother jetting off on a wild holiday, making Liza long for a solo summer of her own. Martha is having a quarter-life crisis. Unemployed, unloved and uninspired, she just can’t get her life together. When Martha sees Kathleen’s advertisement for a driver and companion with whom to share an epic road trip across America, she decides this job might be the answer to her prayers. As these women embark on the journey of a lifetime, they all discover it's never too late to start over.

With a thriving cooking business, a full schedule of volunteer work, and a beautiful home, Daisy Shoemaker should be content. But her teenage daughter can be a handful, her husband can be distant, her work can feel trivial, and she has no real friends. While Daisy tries to identify the root of her dissatisfaction, she’s also receiving misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. Diana’s glamorous, sophisticated, single-lady life is miles away from Daisy’s simpler existence. When an apology leads to an invitation, the two women meet and become friends. But, as they get closer, we learn that their connection was not completely accidental.

Magnolia, South Carolina, 1980. Austin Foster is barely a teenager when her mama dies giving birth to twins, leaving her to pick up the pieces while holding her six siblings together and doing her best to stop her daddy from retreating into his personal darkness. When a few random acts of kindness help to ease the Fosters’ hardships, Austin finds herself relying upon some of Magnolia’s most colorful citizens for friendship and more. But it’s next to impossible to hide the truth about the goings-on at Nolia Farms, and Austin’s desperate attempts to save face all but break her. Just when it seems she might have something more waiting for her --- with the son of a wealthy local family who she’s crushed on for years --- her father makes a choice that will crack wide open the family’s secrets and lead to a public reckoning.

Superintendent of Nurses Julia Stimson must recruit 65 nurses to relieve the battle-worn British, months before American troops are ready to be deployed. She knows that the young nurses serving near the front lines will face a challenging situation, but nothing could have prepared her for the chaos that awaits when they arrive at British Base Hospital 12 in Rouen, France. When trainloads of soldiers stricken by a mysterious respiratory illness arrive one after the other, overwhelming the hospital's limited resources and threatening the health of her staff, Julia faces an unthinkable choice --- to step outside the bounds of her profession and risk the career she has fought so hard for, or to watch the people she cares for most die in her arms.

Young Elzbieta Rabinek has no fondness for the Germans who patrol Warsaw’s streets and impose their curfews, but has never given much thought to what goes on behind the walls that contain her Jewish neighbors. She knows all too well about German brutality --- and that it's the reason she must conceal her true identity. But in befriending Sara, a nurse who shares her apartment floor, Elzbieta makes a discovery that propels her into a dangerous world of deception and heroism. Using Sara's credentials to smuggle children out of the ghetto brings Elzbieta face to face with the reality of the war behind its walls, and to the plight of the Gorka family, who must make the impossible decision to give up their newborn daughter or watch her starve.

A seat at the anchor desk of the most-watched morning show. An adoring husband and a Princeton-bound daughter. Peyton is that woman. She has it all. Skye, her sister, is a stay-at-home mom living in a glitzy suburb of New York. But she’s looking for something real and dreams of a life beyond the PTA and pickup. Max, Peyton’s bright and quirky 17-year-old daughter, is poised to kiss her fancy private school goodbye and head off to pursue her dreams in film. She’s waited her entire life for this opportunity. One little lie. That’s all it takes. For the illusions to crack. For resentments to surface. Suddenly the grass doesn’t look so green. And they’re left wondering: Will they have what it takes to survive the truth?