After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.

"Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. That, combined with her unusual appearance (scarred cheek, tendency to wear the same clothes year in, year out), means that Eleanor has become a creature of habit (to say the least) and a bit of a loner. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza,...

A little girl and her grandmother have a rollicking good time during a sleepover.

Written like a crooked Métis jig, A Grandmother Begins the Story follows five generations of women and bison as they reach for the stories that could remake their worlds and rebuild their futures. Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens truly means. Allie, Carter's mother, is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to...

"After a major life upheaval on the eve of her 40th birthday, Kate Parker finds herself volunteering at Lauderdale House for Exceptional Ladies. There she meets 97-year-old Cecily Finn. Cecily's tongue is as sharp as her mind but she has lost her spark, simply resigning herself to the Imminent End. Having no patience with Kate's plight, Cecily prescribes her a self-help book with a difference - it's a 1957 cookbook, featuring menus for anything life...

At her tenth birthday party in the garden of her Vermont village home, Alice meets two people unlike any she's known before: Theo is a mixed-race New York City kid visiting his white grandparents for the summer; Kenneth is a cosmopolitan artist with AIDS who has come home to convalesce. Alice and Theo form an instant bond and almost as quickly find themselves drawn into the orbit of the magisterial artist. But Kenneth is losing his eyesight, and when...

In the New England village of Grandville, Wendell deVries, the 65-year-old projectionist at the local movie theater, meets an attractive divorcee and an unexpected love affair blooms. Franny, Wendell's daughter and the leader of the town's drama group, is confronted by a newcomer from New York City who insists that her politically correct play be produced, sending Franny into a spiral of self-doubt. Lila, Franny's teenage daughter, hears a lecture...

"Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today's most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable...

"Mamoon Azam is an eminent Indian-born writer who has made a career in England--but now, in his early seventies, his reputation is fading, his book sales are nonexistent, and his flamboyant second wife's expensive habits are bleeding him dry. In an attempt to revitalize his career and reputation, Mamoon's publisher commissions Harry, an ambitious young writer, to pen the famous writer's biography. Honored and slightly intimidated, Harry promises himself...

"The lives of three women weave together across centuries in the dazzling new book from the Granta Best of Young British Novelist, author of All the Birds, Singing. Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has always borne witness to the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries, the fates of three women are inextricably linked to this place and to each other. Sarah, accused of being a witch, is fleeing for her...