In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet that will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question what it means...

After losing her mother to cancer, Katie finds herself struggling for survival on a southwestern army base, where she dreams of finding Prince Charming and struggles to understand her distant, abusive father.

The Winters family seemed to have it all: a grand home, a trio of radiant daughters, and a sense that they were safe in their affluent corner of America. But when five-year-old Ellie disappears, the fault lines within the Winters family are exposed. Fifteen years later, Caroline, now a New Orleans cocktail waitress, sees a photograph of a woman in People Magazine. Convinced that it is Ellie all grown up, Caroline embarks on a search for her missing...

Based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, this story follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption. James MacLaren is searching for the wife that deserted him and their children, who later die of smallpox. Lucy is a remarried widow and mother, reluctantly heading west.

Virginia Miner, a fifty-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children's folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel. Also in London is Vinnie's colleague Fred Turner,...

On what might become one of the most significant days in her husband's presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led her to the White House -- and the repercussions of a life lived, as she puts it, "almost in opposition to itself." How can she both love and fundamentally disagree with her husband? How complicit has she been in the trajectory of her own life? What should she do when her private beliefs run against...

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore's Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the older son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet, clumsy Ezra, Pearl's favorite, who...

As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey -- a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.

"A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. A radical young Irish monk struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gathers in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own...