Winner of the British Whitbread First Novel Award, Saving Agnes is a delight to the ear of any listener who enjoys the English language at its best. Rachel Cusk's prose, rich with poetic imagery and insight, is spell-binding. Agnes Day is not quite certain of her own identity. Defining herself by her past failures and fearful of her future, she trudges through her days despising her editing job and searching for that special someone to help her forget...

The members of an elite girls swim team are the reigning queens at their South African boarding school. And then Italian student Fiamma Coronna joins their ranks. Beautiful, athletic, and suddenly commanding all the coach's attention, Fiamma is the envy of every girl on the team-until the summer she walks into the rural grasslands surrounding the school and disappears. Forty years later, the former teammates return to the school for a reunion, and...

As World War II threatens their comfortable life in Hong Kong, young Joan and Emma Lew escape with their family to spend the war years in Macao. When they return home, Emma has developed a deep interest in travel and new experiences, while Joan has turned to movies and thoughts of romance to escape the problems of ordinary life. As the girls become women, each follows a path different from what her family expects. But through periods of great happiness...

Follows the love affairs and belated growing up of a "Generation X" pop music fanatic and record store owner.

In Timothy Murphy's Getting Off Clean, the one thing that Eric Fitzpatrick wants is to escape-both from his family and the racially tense town in which he lives. The only son of an Italian-Irish family in a working class suburb of Boston, he intends to go away to college and leave his old life far behind. But, all his plans are set askew when he meets Brooks, a mysterious, wealthy, black student at a local prep school. As their relationship grows...

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.