Caroline Venable has everything her Southern heritage promised: money, prestige, a powerful husband - and a predictable routine of country-club luncheons, cocktail parties, and dinners hosting her husband's wealthy friends, clients, and associates in his successful land-developing conglomerate. To escape her stifling routine, Caro drinks a little too much. But her true solace is the Lowcountry island her beloved Granddaddy left her - an oasis of breathtaking beauty that is home to a band of wild ponies.

For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly - happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine.

Molly Bell Redwine was raised to believe that nothing is more important than "The Family". But everything Molly values is challenged when her domineering mother dies, her husband leaves her for a younger woman, and her Atlanta family scatters to the four winds. She takes refuge by visiting friends in Martha's Vineyard, a very different world that hastens her changing identity.

Elegant Kate, walking a tightrope over an abyss of lies...sensitive, sensible, self-contained Cecie...Ginger, the heiress, sexy, vibrant, richer than sin...and poor, hopeless, brilliant Fig. They came together as sorority sisters on a Southern campus in the '60s. Four young women bound by rare, blinding early friendship, they spent two idyllic spring breaks at Nags Head, North Carolina, the isolated strip of barrier islands where grand old weather-beaten houses perch defiantly on the edge of a storm-tossed sea.

In this collection of heartfelt and involving vignettes, Anne Rivers Siddons, the beloved best-selling author of Downtown, Hill Towns, and Colony, offers a stirring and insightful look at our everyday world and how one woman has chosen to live in it.

Peyton is not ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone a barely remembered cousin who just rolled into town. However, her father seems to like Nora well enough, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which raises Nora slightly in Peyton's esteem. Maybe Nora is just what quiet Lytton, Georgia, needs this summer.

When beautiful, dirt-poor Ruth Yancey rises to become mistress of Sparta, Georgia's finest mansion, she reveals a heart of pure evil. For three generations, she rules the mansion through cruel manipulation and insinuation, breaking hearts and shattering souls - until one courageous woman decides to match her madness.

Pat Conroy is without doubt America's favorite storyteller, a writer who portrays the anguished truth of the human heart and the painful secrets of families in richly lyrical prose and unforgettable narratives. Now, in Beach Music, he tells of the dark memories that haunt generations, in a story that spans South Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the unutterable terrors of the Holocaust.

Fresh off a bad breakup with a longtime boyfriend, Nantucket sweetheart Lizbet Keaton is desperately seeking a second act. When she’s named the new general manager of the Hotel Nantucket, a once Gilded Age gem turned abandoned eyesore, she hopes that her local expertise and charismatic staff can win the favor of their new London billionaire owner, Xavier Darling, as well as that of Shelly Carpenter, the wildly popular Instagram tastemaker who can help put them back on the map.

Hollis Shaw, creator of the popular food blog, Hungry with Hollis, is shocked when her heart surgeon husband, Matthew, is killed in a one-car accident on a snowy morning. The cracks in Hollis’s perfect life—her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, Caroline—grow deeper. So when Hollis hears about something called a “Five-Star Weekend”—one woman organizes a trip for her best friend from each phase of her life: her teenage years, her twenties, her thirties, and midlife—she decides to host her own Five-Star Weekend on Nantucket.

Escape to the South Carolina Lowcountry, where family bonds and hidden secrets run deep. In this gripping tale of self-discovery, Victoria Benton Frank introduces us to Maggie, struggling to find her place in the world when she receives a phone call bringing her back to her hometown of Sullivan's Island.

Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered - and shadowed - by tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he searches for something to sustain him and finds it among a tightly knit group of outsiders. Surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as Charleston, South Carolina’s dark legacy of racism and class divisions, these friends will endure until a final test forces them to face something none of them are prepared for.

Dorothea Benton Frank is a treasure of American letters with numerous New York Times best-sellers to her credit and a portfolio full of critical acclaim. “Mixing high drama and high jinks” ( Booklist), her third Lowcountry novel follows the fortunes of the dysfunctional Abbot family. Looking to set her life aright, Anna Lutz Abbot returns to her South Carolina lowcountry hometown. And as she attempts to right past wrongs, Anna receives help and support from a quirky cast of lovable locals sure to endear themselves to listeners.

Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed.

The Lowcountry of South Carolina is where By Invitation Only begins, at a barbecue engagement party thrown by Diane English Stiftel, her brother Floyd, and her parents to celebrate her son’s engagement. On this gorgeous, magical night, the bride’s father, Alejandro Cambria, a wealthy power broker whose unbelievably successful career in private equity made him one of Chicago’s celebrated elite, discovers the limits and possibilities of cell phone range.

Elegant Kate, walking a tightrope over an abyss of lies...sensitive, sensible, self-contained Cecie...Ginger, the heiress, sexy, vibrant, richer than sin...and poor, hopeless, brilliant Fig. They came together as sorority sisters on a Southern campus in the '60s. Four young women bound by rare, blinding early friendship, they spent two idyllic spring breaks at Nags Head, North Carolina, the isolated strip of barrier islands where grand old weather-beaten houses perch defiantly on the edge of a storm-tossed sea.

In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family - her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child. Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person who might care: her grandniece, Justine.

Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.

Sweetgrass is a historic tract of land in South Carolina that has been home to the Blakely family for eight generations. But Sweetgrass — named for the indigenous grass that grows in the area — is in trouble. Taxes are skyrocketing. Bulldozers are leveling the surrounding properties. And the Blakelys could be forced to sell the one thing that continues to hold their disintegrating family together.

The Unreal and the Real is a major event not to be missed. In this two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best short stories--as selected by the National Book Award winning author herself--the reader will be delighted, provoked, amused, and faced with the sharp, satirical voice of one of the best short story writers of the present day. Where on Earth explores Le Guin's earthbound stories which range around the world, from small town Oregon to middle Europe in the middle of revolution to summer camp.

The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.

When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."

On a farm in western Missouri, during the first half of the twentieth century, Matthew and Callie Soames create a life for themselves and raise four headstrong daughters. Jessica will break their hearts. Leonie will fall in love with the wrong man. Mary Jo will escape to New York. And wild child Mathy’s fate will be the family’s greatest tragedy. Over the decades they will love, deceive, comfort, forgive - and, ultimately, they will come to cherish all the more fiercely the bonds of love that hold the family together.

A moving love story set in the Canadian wilderness, Mrs. Mike is a classic tale that has enchanted millions of readers worldwide. It brings the fierce, stunning landscape of Canada to life and tenderly evokes the love that blossoms between Sergeant Mike Flannigan and beautiful young Katherine Mary O'Fallon.

Set on the Mississippi Delta in 1923, this story captures the mind and manners of the Fairchilds, a large aristocratic family, self-contained and elusive as the wind. The vagaries of the Fairchilds are keenly observed, and sometimes harshly judged, by nine-year-old Laura McRaven, a Fairchild cousin who takes The Yellow Dog train to the Delta for Dabney Fairchild’s wedding.

Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.

Being a good mother is never simple: each day brings new choices and challenges. For Diane Robbins, being a devoted single mother has resulted in her greatest joy and darkest sorrow. Weeks before her daughter was born, she and her husband, Tim McIntosh, received the news that every parent fears. Tim had not reckoned on their child being anything less than perfect, and abruptly fled to a solitary existence on the sea. Diane was left with a newborn - almost alone.

Caretta Rutledge thought she’d left her Southern roots and troubled family far behind. But an unusual request from her mother – coming just as her own life is spinning out of control – has Cara heading back to the scenic Lowcountry of her childhood summers. Before long, the rhythms of the island open her heart in wonderful ways as she repairs the family beach house, becomes a bona fide “turtle lady” and renews old acquaintances long thought lost.

Bezellia Grove was born into the most prominent of Nashville families, but that didn’t stop her from having an alcoholic mother and a distant, adulterous father. Her nanny, Maizelle, and Nathaniel, the handyman, are the people who have taken care of her since she can remember. She considers them family, but her parents just consider them servants because they are Black. When Bezellia has a clandestine romance with Nathaniel's son, Whites and Blacks unite in fury at the young couple.

Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.