When Elm Creek Quilts announces openings for two new teachers, quilters everywhere are vying to land the prestigious post. The impending departure of two founding members means untold changes for the Elm Creek Quilters. As they begin the interview process, a single question emerges: Who can possibly take the place of beloved colleagues and friends? "We must evaluate all of the applicants' qualities," advises Master Quilter Sylvia Compson. "Our choice...

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

Jack is terminally ill and has a very short time to live. As Christmas approaches, he prepares to spend his last days with his wife Lizzie and their three kids. But suddenly, Lizzie is tragically killed in a car accident, and the children are separated and sent to live with different family members. However, when Jack miraculously recovers, he sets out to reunite his family.

Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney has never been a devotee of tarot cards or crystal balls. But when the fortune-teller at the county fair suggests that she "redream" her life, Ave Maria figures a little redirection is in order. Ave Maria's world will never be quite the same again...especially now that there's a teenager smack-dab in the middle of it.

After a messy break up with her longtime boyfriend, a woman faces losing both her house and her business. Consequently, she takes in three roommates: a freckled college graduate, mysterious divorced man, and a recently widowed female chef.

"Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret, something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all; she is an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of...

Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and a young niece, Ruth. An Oprah Book Club selection and bestseller in hardcover, Drowning Ruth, now in paperback, is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart. Schwarz's first novel explores...

A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace--there is some question if it was rape--sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow. By the author of What I Lived For.

Mick and Megan O'Brien finally make plans to walk down the aisle, but not everyone is as happy about the upcoming wedding as they are. There's a good chance complications will keep this reunited couple from ever saying "I do."

Ruth, a young woman living in a rural Illinois town, looks back on the people who have shaped her life, including her runaway father, shrewish mother, and crazy husband.