"Alaska, 1974. Ernt Allbright came home from the Vietnam War a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes the impulsive decision to move his wife and daughter north where they will live off the grid in America's last true frontier. Cora will do anything for the man she loves, even if means following him into the unknown. Thirteen-year-old Leni, caught in the riptide of her parents' passionate, stormy relationship, has little...

Danny Yzemski is a husky, pop radio-loving loner balancing a dysfunctional homelife with the sudden harsh realities of freshman year at a high school marked by racial turbulence.

"This debut novel takes place at the elite Seoul National University in 1970s South Korea during the final years of a repressive regime. The novel follows the fates of two women--Jisun, the daughter of a powerful tycoon, who eschews her privilege to become an underground labor activist in Seoul; and Namin, her best friend from childhood, a brilliant, tireless girl who has grown up with nothing, and whose singular goal is to launch herself and her...

1973. The Watergate hearings are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is still officially considered a mental illness. Jonathan Collins, a bullied, anxious, asthmatic kid, is alone aside from an alcoholic father and his sympathetic neighbor and friend Starla. In his imagination his hero, David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, and dead relatives guide him through the rough terrain of his life. In this alternate reality Jonathan...

The year is 1969, and the Bayleen Island Folk Fest is abuzz with one name: Jesse Reid. Jesse Reid's intricate guitar riffs and supple baritone are poised to tip from fame to legend with this one headlining performance. That is, until his motorcycle crashes on the way to the show. Jane Quinn is a Bayleen Island local whose music flows as naturally as her long blond hair. When she and her bandmates are asked to play in Jesse Reid's place at the festival,...

In late 1970, Oliver Desmarais drops dead in his front yard while hanging Christmas lights. In the year that follows, his widow, Virginia, struggles to find her place on the campus of the elite New Hampshire men’s college where Oliver was a professor. While Virginia had always shared her husband’s prejudices against the four outspoken, never-married women on the faculty—dubbed the Gang of Four by their male counterparts—she now finds herself...

From a death camp to a college. Over thirty years, Schmuel's journey takes him from Auschwitz to New Hampshire. But, not all who leave the Holocaust are survivors. Some are criminals. And even a small New Hampshire town, where everybody knows everybody, can have dirty secrets. Schmuel, now Sam Miller, is a forty-year-old divorcee seeking the quiet life away from his boyhood horrors. But, a call from a fellow Auschwitz survivor drags his past back...

"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...

"The protagonists of these skillful and inventive stories have traveled various paths--from Japan to Brazil, L.A. to Gardena, San Francisco to Tokyo--but along the way, they have all become archivists, whether they know it or not. They examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high-school locker-room chatter, cart the contents of a household cross-country, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants....

In 1971, in the hardscrabble mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, Jayne Ranney, fifteen and from a disbanded family, finds herself adrift after many setbacks : her father's accidental death, her brother's residence in the Billerica House of Correction, and her mother's abuse and neglect. Hope of a stable future emerges when Jayne is hired as a runner for the city's preeminent bookmaker, Galen "the Greek" Stathakis, operating out the Skillet Bar. With...