"Published one year after its author's death in 1818, "Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. On its most basic level, the book is a love story. On another level, it is a deft exploration of human foibles and social flux. Twenty-seven-year-old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a navel officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement...

"It is the summer of 1950 - and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia's family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. 'I wish I could...

Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.

A triumphant debut novel and follow-up to Karen Russellrsquo;s universally acclaimed short story collectionSt. Lucyrsquo;s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline-think Buddenbrooksset in the Florida Everglades-and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as the World of Darkness. Ava, a resourceful but terrified...

Abandoned by his beautiful wife, Irene, Henry and their two young children, Thomas and Margaret, spend that summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. Henry, an itinerant butcher, struggles to provide for them, but often must leave them alone as he travels the county in search of work. He has not told the children why their mother left or if she'll return. When Mrs. Phyllis Farley, a prosperous neighbor, begins to woo the children as companions for...

Coworkers, acquaintances and former lovers know Rourke Kilpatrick as a dashing district attorney who doesn't let emotions get in his way. If he breaks a heart or bends the law to prosecute a criminal, he does so without apology. That's why he is the first person twenty-four-year-old Rebecca Cullen calls for advice when the younger brother she's been forced to raise by herself gets arrested on trumped-up drug charges. To her surprise, Rourke returns...

In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of...

Dark and compassionate, graceful yet raw, Undressing the Moon explores the seams between childhood and adulthood, between love and loss. . . At thirty, Piper Kincaid feels too young to be dying. Cancer has eaten away her strength; she'd be alone but for a childhood friend who's come home by chance. Yet with all the questions of her future before her, she's adrift in the past, remembering the fateful summer she turned fourteen and her life changed...

From the author of The White Bone, a piercing novel of passionate attachment and of the fear and freedom of letting go. Louise Kirk learns about love and loss at an early age. When she is nine years old, her former beauty queen mother disappears, leaving a note that reads only, and incorrectly, Louise knows how to work the washing machine. Soon after, the Richters and their adopted son, Abel, move in across the street. Louise's immediate devotion...

Living with her warden father in an apartment above a 1950s prison, Cammie O'Reilly struggles to come to terms with the loss of her mother, who died saving her from harm when she was a baby, and interacts with some of the reformed inmates.