"In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan's debut novel--now widely regarded as a modern classic--examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between these four women and their American-born daughters."--Publisher's description....

For generations, children around the world have come of age with Louisa May Alcott's March girls: hardworking eldest sister Meg, headstrong, impulsive Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. With their father away at war, and their loving mother Marmee working to support the family, the four sisters have to rely on one another for support as they endure the hardships of wartime and poverty. We witness the sisters growing up and figuring out what role...

Joe Gunther puts a murder investigation on hold to help his girlfriend Lyn solve her father's mysterious death in Maine. Discovering that Lyn's father and brother weren't the good guys that Lyn always believed them to be and that they might have been involved with vicious smugglers who murdered them, Gunther sets out to protect Lyn from the same fate.

Book editor Pauline becomes increasingly agitated when it appears that her daughter Teresa's husband Maurice is a philanderer, and disturbed that Teresa's love for Maurice--an echo of the self-destructive love Pauline felt for Teresa's father--is blinding her to the truth.

After spending her life with her mentally retarded mother and agoraphobic neighbor, twelve-year-old Heidi sets out from Reno, Nevada, to New York to find out who she is. Living with her mentally disabled mother who only knows just over twenty words, young Heidi has learned to live in her special world until a new word is suddenly used and repeated by her mother; causing Heidi to think it might be a key to a secret past about which she knows so little....

Sixty-five-year-old Framboise Simon, hiding her true identity, returns to the small town of her youth where she opens a cafe and discovers, hidden in her mother's book of recipes, the true story of the terrible tragedy that took place during the German occupation decades earlier--an event that resulted in her mother being driven from the village.

Four girls continue their mother-daughter book club, reading Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," but from unexpected blizzards to a sledding disaster, nothing goes as planned.

Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love - and its threatened loss - the...

When Jonah and Katherine travel to early 1900s Switzerland and Serbia to return Albert Einstein's daughter, Lieserl, to history, her mother Mileva grasps entirely too much about time travel and has no intention of letting her daughter go.

Entering seventh grade at Walden Middle School, four girls continue their mother-daughter book club, reading Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables," while dealing with a mean, troublemaking classmate.