In 1941 New York, young Joey El Bueno's world is turned upside-down when he meets the enigmatic Jane Bent, a freckle-faced girl with pigtails who seems to know him better than he knows himself, comes and goes at will, claims to have once levitated six feet off the ground, and seems to only be known by Joey.

"Father Dan is homeless. Dismissed by the church for eccentricity and insubordination, he's tried to transform his exile into a kind of pilgrimage, to make his Toyota Camry into a mobile monk's cell. But even this master of self-denial - and straight-up denial - knows when he's lying to himself: "I am a retired priest living out of his car. I am a retired priest, kicked out of his rectory and living in his car with a coyote and a bucket he shits in."...

Aunque la cabeza aún no le falla, los ojos de Elizabeth ya no son lo que eran. Como ya no es capaz de enfrascarse en sus adorados libros ni de contemplar los cuadros que la conmueven, llena ese vacío con música y los recuerdos de su familia, en especial de su amada hermana gemela, Emily. Cuando por azar se descubren los diarios de su padre después de un accidente, el pasado se vuelve omnipresente.Con la ayuda de Morgan, una adolescente problemática...

Traveling to France during World War I to bring home her fifteen-year-old brother, who ran away to enlist, Iris, a young Australian nurse, decides to stay in Paris to help establish a field hospital staffed entirely by women.

"Ori's holidays are an endless series of elaborately awful meals cooked by her one-time stepfather Dave's latest bride. Attended by a loose assemblage of family, Ori particularly dreads Grandma Elving, grandmother of Dave's fourth wife, and her rhapsodizing about the Christmas she worked at Woolworth's in the 1950s. And, of course, she hates being condescended to by beautiful, popular Sloane and her latest handsome pre-med or pre-law boyfriend. But...

"It is mid-October, 1997, harvest time in the Columbia Basin of central Washington state, a rich apple- and pear-growing region. Ben Givens, recently widowed, is a retired heart surgeon, once admired for his steadiness of hand, his precision, his endurance. He has terminal colon cancer. While Ben does not readily accept defeat, he is determined to avoid suffering rather than engage it. And so, accompanied by his two hunting dogs, he sets out through...

"Lou Ann Hunter's mother, Patricia, has always had a passionate nature, which explains why she's been married and divorced five times and spooned enough male patients to be ousted from three elderly care facilities. She also has Alzheimer's, which is why she wants to spend her remaining months or years surrounded by memories at her family's decrepit old plantation in Louisiana with her only daughter. Lou Ann, a.k.a. Lulu the Love Guru, has built an...