Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family

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Laurel Estabrook's life changes drastically after being attacked. She goes from being outgoing to withdraw, her photography and work at a homeless shelter are now her life. Laurel meets Bobby, a mentally ill man, at the shelter with a box of photos he won't let anyone see. When he dies she discovers that he photographed celebrities. Laurel becomes obsessed and searches for the truth of his former life.

"...Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who is beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is about to be impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life carefully negotiating her parents' conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father...As she grows into...

A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a penetrating look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who hated anything to do with domesticity. The Walls children learned...

"DG is five the first time her mother goes away. She'll go away again and again before DG finally understands why: mental illness and a manipulating husband. DG's family aren't like other families. Her father moves them constantly. Moving, along with the stigma of mental illness, isolates the family. In public, they seem the perfect American dream. In private they grow increasingly unstable. Darling Girl unfolds in a series of vignettes spanning ten...

"The laugh-out-loud story of a girl determined to keep up with her aging, crazy-as-a-fox mother and learn the truth of her mother's long-secret past...Willow Havens is ten years old and obsessed with the fear that her mother will die. Her mother, Polly, is a cantankerous, take-no-prisoners Southern woman who lives to shoot varmints, drink margaritas, and antagonize the neighbors--and she sticks out like a sore thumb among the young, modern mothers...

"When six students are chosen to participate in a weekly talk with no adults allowed, they discover that when they're together, it's safe to share the hopes and fears they have to hide from the rest of the world"--

"How to Set a Fire and Why is a blistering, singular, devastating novel by Jesse Ball ("A young genius who hits all of the right notes." --Chicago Tribune) about a teenage girl who has lost everything and will burn anything. Lucia has been kicked out of school, again, this time for stabbing a boy in the neck with a pencil. Her father is dead; her mother is in a mental institute; and she's living in a garage-turned-bedroom with her aunt. Making her...

Trussoni believed she controlled the narration of her life. But from their first kiss she was spellbound by Nikolai, a novelist from Bulgaria, sharing a love of jazz and books and travel, passions that intensify their whirlwind romance. Eight years later, hopeful to renew their marriage, they move to the south of France, to a picturesque medieval village in the Languedoc, where they buy a thirteenth-century stone fortress. It is here she finds the...