36-year-old Sophie Stanton has just lost her husband to cancer. But instead of the five stages of grief, there are fourteen: Denial, Oreos, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Ashes, Lust, Waitressing, Mentoring, Dating, Baking, Acceptance, Goodwill, and Thanksgiving. Determined to be a good widow, Sophie nonetheless ends up scarfing cartons of ice cream for breakfast, weeping in the produce section, and showing up at work in her robe and bunny slippers....

"Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, unexpected, and explosive. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way...

A woman lives alone in an isolated lighthouse on the coast of California ... until a man appears on her doorstep who knows every single secret she's kept since one fateful night.

From the best-selling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog comes a story of one man's promise to keep a secret that will keep him at a remove from the greatest joy in his life. One night at a party of artists and intellectuals in Kyoto, Japanese art dealer Haru encounters a woman who unsettles him more than anyone else ever has and he is compelled to know her. Maud, a French woman passing through Japan, is distant. Her cold gaze challenges any exchange,...

A night spent sleeping on dirt and leaves is not how Claire Matchett expected to spend her vacation. She thought this would be a break from the stresses of work and raising her young children. A chance to repair her damaged marriage. A week of hiking and hot tubs with two other couple friends. It sounded like heaven. Then Claire's minivan breaks down on a lonely dirt road. With no cell reception, the group has no choice but to hike the rest of the...

"Something isn't right at Caseham High School. Last year, the school was rocked by scandal: a teacher was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a student. Now, Addie is a pariah and will do anything to get through the year. More than that, she's desperate to keep the truth from coming to light. Evie, a colleague of the disgraced teacher, is horrified to find Addie in her class. She knows the girl can't be trusted and soon realizes she's...

"After ten years, Sarah and her husband Roshan are looking forward to catching up with their closest school friends. So when one of them invites the group to spend a week in a beautiful converted church, they eagerly accept. A vision of fear... Very quickly though, Sarah becomes unsettled. She is frightened by the church's creepy surroundings, and she thinks she might be seeing ghosts. Even more disturbing, a masked woman is committing armed robberies...

American women - American wives - have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be "helpmeets" to their ambitious husbands...

In Singapore, three very different women--Dara, a workaholic lawyer from the UK; Amaka, a sharp-tongued banker from Nigeria; and Lillian, a pianist turned "trailing spouse" from the United States--find their lives inexplicably intertwined upon the arrival of a handsome and mysterious man from Geneva who brings their worlds crashing down.

"A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn's debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind's capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and...