Once an aspiring writer, Olga traded literary ambition for marriage and motherhood; when Mario dumps her after 15 years, she is utterly unprepared. Though she tells herself that she is a competent woman, nothing like the poverella (poor abandoned wife) that mothers whispered about in her childhood, Olga falls completely apart. Routine chores overwhelm her; she neglects her appearance and forgets her manners; she throws herself at the older musician...

On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien...

Structured as a daybook of sorts, with the Cursing Mommy -- beleaguered wife of Larry and mother of two boys, twelve and nine -- trying (more or less) valiantly to offer tips on how to do various tasks around the home, only to end up on the ground, cursing, surrounded by broken glass. Her voice is somewhere between Phyllis Diller's and Sylvia Plath's: a hilariously desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red wine, who speaks...

The internationally bestselling novel by the author of A Kiss Before Dying, The Boys from Brazil, and Rosemary's Baby With an Introduction by Peter Straub For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret -- a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same. At once a masterpiece of psychological...

"Peeling apples for tartes tatin, an Ohio mother wonders how to exist in a world of distraction and fake facts, besieged by a tweet-happy president and trigger-happy neighbors, all of them oblivious to what Dupont has dumped into the rivers and what's happening at the factory farm down the interstate -- not to mention what was done to the land's first inhabitants. A torrent of consciousness, narrated in a single sentence by a woman whose wandering...

This wickedly funny English whodunit was a Mystery Guild Main Selection. Its spunky heroine, interior decorator Ellie Haskell, aspires to live a perfectly normal life with her husband and children in their lovely old house. But bizarre events and outlandish characters keep landing on her doorstep in Chitterton Fells, the charming little village by the sea. Just when Ellie means to escape her hectic life by taking a vacation in France, her long-lost...

From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings -- high and gabled -- and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside -- in lawns and on playgrounds -- wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall's periphery, the subdivision is a...