Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who has just moved into his grandmother’s house and who is as awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting” man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures. Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier.

Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983. This wry, propulsive story about a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. But then, Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal, and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help. Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family, and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: The twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way.

At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar, and he probably doesn’t have much time left—he’s had three heart attacks already. But when PJ reads the obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again.

From the bestselling author Judith Viorst comes a witty and poignant exploration of the joys and sorrows of life’s twilight years—one that leaves us laughing, pondering, and grateful for the moments we have left.

Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic and food writer and a longtime member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Just as she’s finishing the book tour for her latest bestseller, Dana is asked to join the church search committee for a new minister. Under pressure to find her next book idea, she agrees, and resolves to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. That memoir, Search, follows the travails of the committee and their candidates—and becomes its own media sensation.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

Twenty-six-year-old Ruth excels at microchip design but decides to get rich the old-fashioned way: robbing banks. She becomes a cybercriminal and devotes five years to siphoning more than $250 million out of the banking system using a hacked firewall chip that she created and only she knows how to access. Then one night an alarm goes off and she realizes she’s been discovered.

Twelve-year-old Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly 18 months. But there are things Elvis doesn't yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house.

A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers, the entire publishing world…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.

Elizabeth aches for one more precious hour with her son who died in a senseless accident. Andy is desperate to find his first love who vanished after a whirlwind romance. Logan craves the rush of surfing and mountain climbing, yearning to reclaim the freedom he lost after a misstep landed him in a wheelchair. Brooke is looking for an hour of relief from the guilt of an unforgivable mistake.

On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments. In the 1980s, against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth, wants only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. I

When Isabelle Poole meets Dr. Preston Grind, she's just about out of options. She recently graduated from high school and is pregnant with her art teacher's baby. Her mother is dead, and her father is a drunk. The art teacher is too much of a head case to help raise the child. Izzy knows she can be a good mother, but without any money or prospects she's left searching. So when Dr. Grind offers her a space in The Infinite Family Project, she accepts. Housed in a spacious compound in Tennessee, she joins nine other couples, all with children the same age as her newborn son.

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart?

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures. Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier.

Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.

How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.

The third of four children born to a middle-class Calcutta family, quiet Durga is surprisingly the first to leave the nest of her loving, overbearing family. She is not as charming as her older sister, Tia, as lighthearted as her brother, Arjun, or as clever as her younger sister, Parul. But when she arrives in Ireland to work at a tech company, she finds that for the first time ever she is free—to have fun, to stay out, to sample everything that life has to offer. Suddenly, Durga can be whoever she wants to be. And she wants it all. But freedom comes at a price.

Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents' madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.

With a leading role on a hit TV show and a relationship with Hollywood’s latest heartthrob, Meg Bryan appears to have everything she ever wanted. But underneath, her happiness is as fake as her stage name, Lana Lord. Following a tiny nervous breakdown at her thirtieth birthday party, she books an impromptu trip to Ireland. Specifically, to the village where she and her best friend Aimee always dreamt of moving. When Meg arrives, the people in town don’t just recognize her, they seem to know her. She quickly—reluctantly—realizes she has somehow slipped into an alternate reality.

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.

Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if your small town’s midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia’s orbit.

Curtis Wilson is a cello prodigy, growing up in the Southeast D.C. projects with a drug dealer for a father. But through determination and talent, and the loving support of his father’s girlfriend, Larissa, Curtis claws his way out of his challenging circumstances and rises to unimagined heights in the classical music world—even soloing with the New York Philharmonic. And then, suddenly, his life disintegrates. His father, Zippy, turns state’s evidence, implicating his old bosses. Now the family—Curtis included—must enter the witness protection program if they want to survive.

Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. But then, Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal, and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help. Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family, and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: The twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way.