Fifty-year-old artist's model Helen Knightly, worn down by years of dealing with her depressed and needy mother, gives in to the temptation to smother the now old and senile Clair and spends the next twenty-four hours feeling both liberated by what she has done, and tormented by her memories of the past and expectations for the future.

" For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice's old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries...

In West Hall, Vermont, some secrets never die ... In 1908 Sara Harrison Shea was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. When Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea's diary hidden beneath the...

A forty-ton truck hurtles out of control on a snowy country road, a teenage girl on horseback in its path. In a few terrible seconds the life of a family is shattered. And a mother's quest begins--to save her maimed daughter and a horse driven mad by pain. It is an odyssey that will bring her to The Horse Whisperer. He is the stuff of legend. His voice can calm wild horses and his touch heals broken spirits. For secrets uttered softly into pricked...

When a woman murders a former lover and is imprisoned for life, her daughter must navigate a new reality - that of a series of foster homes, each its own universe, each with its own limits and dangers.

Bernadette is a frightfully intelligent wife and mother whose intense allergy to Seattle specifically, and to people in general, has driven her to hire a virtual assistant in India to execute even her most basic tasks. Then her daughter, Bee, insists on a family trip to Antarctica as her reward for getting perfect grades in middle school, and Bernadette is faced with the daunting prospect of actual human interaction. And then Bernadette disappears....

Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child���the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment���weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her...

Ginny Young boards a plane to reunite with her mother, whom she has not seen in over three decades, and recalls the summer in 1950s rural Wisconsin when she turned twelve years old and her life changed forever.

"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....

Vianne Rocher, who has moved to Paris under a new name, Yanne Charbonneau, opens a chocolaterie and hopes to protect her daughters Anouk and Rosette, but her life is blown off course when a businessman named Thierry and a vibrant woman named Zozie enter her life.