Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the secrets and dreams of characters whose lives are intertwined by coincidence and necessity, possessions and experience. From the boozy 1950s to the culturally vacuous present, through the jungle of city streets and suburban bedroom communities, lines blur between families and acquaintances, violence and love, hope and despair. As fathers try to connect with...

Two women die under similar circumstances -- Melchior Kimmel killed his wife, Walter Stackhouse did not kill his. Lieutenant Corby, investigating the Stackhouse case, links it with the unsolved Kimmel murder. Then begins a nightmare for the two suspected men. Corby's wish to get at the truth becomes perverted by his ambition into an almost insane desire to extract confessions. Soon all three are caught in a trap from which there is no escape.

The very first work of fiction by the best-selling, acclaimed author of City on Fire -- his piercingly beautiful treasure box of a novella about two families in the suburbs, now in a newly designed full-color edition For years, the Hungates and the Harrisons have coexisted peacefully in the same Long Island neighborhood, enjoying the pleasures and weathering the pitfalls of their suburban habitat. But when the patriarch of one family dies unexpectedly,...

In a shiny new subdivision in 1970s Toronto, Marilyn greets new neighbors with fresh-baked cookies before she starts stealing from them. Stay-at-home-wife Francesca believes passion is just one yard away, only in the arms of another man. And Darren doesn't understand why his mother insists he keep his head down, even though he gets good grades like his white friends. When a series of inexplicable suicides begin to haunt their community, no one is...

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed, Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late twentieth century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read -- and remembered -- for a long time to come. --Publisher.

What if the life you wanted, and the woman you fell in love with, belonged to someone else? With her marriage troubled after her husband loses his job, Claire's friendship with a local police officer starts turning heads.

How difficult is it to live in truth when you live with another? When is a relationship worth saving, and when is it better to let it go? In her previous novels, Elizabeth Berg has demonstrated a rare talent for laying bare the lives of ordinary people and everyday events with startling clarity, focus, and raw emotion. In Say When, she again negotiates perfectly the fine balance between humor and poignancy as she charts the days and nights of a family...

"Five minutes before her flight is set to take off, Kate Pulaski, failed screenwriter and newly failed wife with scarcely a hundred dollars to her name, learns that her estranged father has killed himself. More shocked than saddened by the news, she gives in to her siblings' request that she join them, along with her many half-siblings and most of her father's five former wives, in Atlanta, their birthplace, for a final farewell. REUNION takes place...