"Told entirely through the transcripts of the narrator's psychiatric sessions, this intimate portrait of grief and longing follows twenty-year-old Alicia Western as she, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, contemplates the nature of madness, her hallucinations and her own existence in 1972 Black River Falls, Wisconsin."--

"Pushing away her devoted husband, a once-successful writer moves back into her bohemian childhood home, where she struggles to come to terms with the mental illness that has overshadowed her life."-- "There's something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. At forty she spends days unable to get out of bed, and often alienates both strangers and her...

"It's 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She's immediately in awe of her employer--brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women's suffrage. Now, at age...

"Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious,...

In England, a housewife eggs on another to liberate herself and when the other abandons her family to travel the world pursues her with letters. The missives, a jumble of apologies, condemnation, admiration, envy and confessions of her own unhappiness, portray the loneliness and boredom of suburban life.

"A young woman with amnesia falls under the influence of a powerful doctor in Paris's notorious women's asylum, where she must fight to reclaim dangerous memories-and even more perilously, her sanity-in this gripping historical novel inspired by true events, from the bestselling author of Wunderland. "I didn't see her the day she came to the asylum. Looking back, this sometimes strikes me as unlikely. Impossible, even, given how utterly her arrival...

Kit Pitman is fourteen and lives in a ramshackle cottage on the outer banks of Newfoundland, where isolation is all she knows. The only visitors are fogbound fishermen and an occasional young man brought ashore to keep the bloodlines clean. But Kit's isolation is compounded by the mystery that surrounds her family and her illegitimate birth. Her mother, Josie, is mentally disabled and often runs wild among the clapboard houses that dot the shore....

After being raised by her grandmother, Caroline returns to Hawaii to find out what happened on the day her parents died.

When Henry Ireland dies unexpectedly from what appears to be a riding accident in August 1863, the failed landowner leaves behind little save his high-strung young widow, Isabel-who somehow ends up in the home of Ireland's friend James Dixey. A celebrated naturalist, Dixey collects strange trophies in his secluded, decaying manse and has questionable associations with rather unsavory characters-including a pair of thuggish poachers named Dewar and...