Taking over her parents’ estate-sale business is not the life’s work that Emma Lewis bargained for. Yes, she grew up helping them empty people’s nests, but nothing prepared her for her biggest and stickiest “get”—the grand, beautiful house of ill repute masquerading as a decidedly beddable B and B. Should Emma turn down potential clients in need of decluttering just because they are shady, escort-y, and proud of it?

Unexpectedly widowed Gwen-Laura Schmidt is still mourning her husband when her sister, Margot, invites her to join forces as roommates in Margot's luxurious Village apartment. For Margot, divorced amid scandal, then made Ponzi-poor, it's a chance to shake Gwen out of her grief and help make ends meet. To further this effort she enlists a third boarder, the handsome Anthony. As the three swap money-making schemes and Gwen ventures back out into the dating world, the arrival of Margot's paroled ex in the apartment downstairs creates not just complications but the chance for all sorts of unexpected forgiveness.

It's 1962, and all across America barriers are collapsing. But when Natalie Marx's mother inquires about summer accommodations in Vermont, she gets the following reply: The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. For twelve-year-old Natalie, who has a stubborn sense of justice, the words are not a rebuff but an infuriating, irresistible challenge.

Elinor Lipman has populated her fictional universe with characters so utterly real that we feel like they're old friends. Now she shares an even more intimate world with us - her own - in essays that offer a candid, charming take on modern life. Looking back and forging ahead, she considers the subjects that matter most: childhood and condiments, long marriage and solo living, career and politics. Here you'll find the lighthearted: a celebration of four decades of All My Children, a reflection on being Jewish in heavily Irish-Catholic Lowell on St. Patrick's Day, a hilariously unflinching account of her tiptoe into online dating.

Henry is a lawyer, an old-fashioned man, gay, successful, and lonely. Thalia, his stepdaughter from a misbegotten marriage, is now twenty-nine, an actress, hopeful and estranged from her newly widowed crackpot mother. Hoping it will lead to better things for her career, Thalia poses as the girlfriend of a former sitcom star and current horror-movie luminary who is down on his romantic luck. When Thalia and her complicated social life move into the basement of Henry’s Upper West Side townhouse, she finds a champion in her long-lost father, and he finds new life—and maybe even new love.