Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of...

For Blinking Jack Stokes, everything started with Ruby Pitt--from the day he spotted her sitting under a tree. Never mind that Jack was a skinny 40-year-old tenant farmer, and Ruby the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry. Jack found he could talk to Ruby, unlike other women. And Ruby knew she could trust Jack to take care of her, unlike her first husband.

Despite a police search that will turn into a nationwide obsession, Beth Cappadora's three-year-old son has vanished without a trace. The family disintegrates as Beth, who is overwhelmed by grief, neglects her husband and two other children.

In the pastoral community of Reddington, Vermont, during the harsh winter of 1981, Sibyl Danforth makes a life-or-death decision based on fifteen years of experience as a respected midwife -- a decision intended to save a child, a decision that will change her life forever.

A fictional narrative in which Fran Benedetto, a woman who was abused by her husband, examines the reasons why she stayed in her marriage for so long, and ponders whether leaving was the right thing to do.

A pilot's wife is taught to be prepared for the late-night knock at the door. But when Kathryn Lyons receives word that a plane flown by her husband, Jack, has exploded near the coast of Ireland, she confronts the unfathomable--one startling revelation at a time. Soon drawn into a maelstrom of publicity fueled by rumors that Jack led a secret life, Kathryn sets out to learn who her husband really was, whatever that knowledge might cost. Her search...

A Chilean woman searches for her lover in the goldfields of 1840s California. Arriving as a stowaway, Eliza finances her search with various jobs, including playing the piano in a brothel.

Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his closed-minded, stricken coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's constantly reminded of just how messed up his life is.With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, Harley is an orphan with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager. Just nineteen years old, he's marooned...

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along...

Traces the author's journey of self-discovery after the dissolution of her marriage, revealing how she found healing by rejecting gender standards and refusing to settle for a "good-enough" life.