Although she feels that the holidays are a season of misery, Jeanette Brioche is pushed into working on the town's annual Christmas festival with the sexy new town manager, Tom McDonald. But with romance in the air, Jeanette and Tom take a fresh look at their painful pasts and a hopeful look into the future.

"Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red blooded original. When she's not onstage, we look forward to her return..." And now, indeed, Olive Kitteridge has returned, as indomitable as ever. "It turns out--I just wasn't done with Olive," said Strout. "It was like she kept poking me in the ribs, so I finally said 'Okay, okay...'" Now Olive returns, this time as a person getting older, navigating her next decade...

Cilla, a former child star who has found more satisfying work as a restorer of old houses, has come to her grandmother's Shenandoah Valley farmhouse, tools at her side, to rescue it from ruin. In the attic, she finds a cache of unsigned letters suggesting that her grandmother was pregnant when she died and that the father was a local married man. When Cilla becomes the target of a series of intimidating acts and a frightening, violent assault, her...

Christmas, 1958: Elvis is on the radio, Ike is in the White House, the Lord is in his holy temple . but there is no peace in Mt. Jefferson. In a small town where everybody seems to know everybody, there are still a few secrets. Three families find they are connected in ways they never suspected: an angry teen, a dying man, a lonely wife, a daughter in trouble . just ordinary people, muddling their way through ordinary challenges. Illness....

Hoffman offers a fictional glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions. A young wounded Civil War soldier is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet falls in love with a blind man, and a mysterious traveler comes to town in the...

"Annajane Hudgens truly believes she is over her ex-husband, Mason Bayless. They've been divorced for four years, she's engaged to a new, terrific guy, and she's ready to leave the small town where she and Mason had so much history. She is so over Mason that she has absolutely no problem attending his wedding to the beautiful, intelligent, delightful Celia. But when fate intervenes and the wedding is called to a halt as the bride is literally walking...

Originally published pseudonymously in 1893, "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" follows the tragic tale of Maggie and her life in the harsh streets and tenements of the New York City Bowery district. Initially rejected by publishers for being viewed as too brutal and accurate in its descriptions of poverty and female sexuality, Stephen Crane published the work at his own expense. Following the success of Crane's novel "The Red Badge of Courage," this...

When Timmy Willie from the country and Johnny Town-Mouse visit one another, they get a taste of each other's very different lives. Sometimes, there really is no place like home!

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal...

Grace, a seemingly reserved librarian, shows the town of Cedar Cove what she is truly made of when her husband mysteriously vanishes, forcing her to call upon her inner strength and courage to help her two daughters deal with his disappearance.