Spending the days searching for truths on an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp, eleven-year-old Dorothy Zook, the granddaughter of an herbalist and eccentric healer, finds her childhood upended by family secrets, passionate love, and violent men where the only bridge across the water is her wayward mother.
"A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class, and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters." --The Pulitzer Prizes
Raised on idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different choice for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.
While on her family's yearly escape to Cape Cod, Rocky, sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, relives the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers, coming face-to-face with her family's history and future and accepting she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.
In North Dakota farming country in 2008, Gary Geist is about to marry young Kismet Poe. Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet, and he is determined to steal her and is eager to be a homewrecker. Meanwhile, Kismet's mother also works for the farm and has dark visions for their futures.
From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried.
One lapse in judgment lands Frida Liu, a 39-year-old Chinese-American single mother in Philadelphia, in a government reform program where bad mothers are retrained using robot doll children with artificial intelligence, and custody of her 18-month-old daughter Harriet hangs in the balance.
After the death of her literary rival in a freak accident, author June Hayward steals her just-finished masterpiece, sending it to her agent as her own work, but as emerging evidence threatens her success, she discovers how far she'll go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
Patroclus, an awkward young prince, follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate. Set during the Trojan War.
