Chris & Joey's Pick   A novel about love, memory, and motherhood. Nadine Morgan travels the world as a journalist, running from anything that might tie her down. Since an assignment in Cape Town ended in tragedy and regret, Nadine has not returned to South Africa, or opened her heart--until she hears the story of Jason Irving, an American student beaten to death by angry youths at the height of the apartheid era. Years later, his mother is told that Jason's killers have applied for amnesty. Filled with rage, she resolves to fight the murderers' pleas for forgiveness. As Nadine follows the Irvings to beautiful, ghost-filled South Africa, she is flooded with memories of a time when the pull toward adventure and intrigue left her with a broken heart. Hoping to lose herself in her coverage of the murder trial, Nadine grows closer to Jason's mother as well as to the mother of one of Jason's killers--with profound consequences.

Joey's Pick   In an isolated house in rural Vermont, a midwife named Sibyl Danfort takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency cesarean section on a mother she believes has died of a stroke. But what if Sibyl's patient wasn't dead & she inadvertently killed her? Sibyl faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors & the accusations of her own conscience.

Chris' Pick   Diana McBride, a thirty-four-year-old former child pageant contender, now works in a baby store in Long Beach. Between dealing with a catastrophic haircut, the failure of her marriage, and phone calls from her alcoholic mother, Diana has gone off her OCD medication and is trying to cope via washing and cleaning rituals. When pregnant teenager Jamie Ramirez enters the store, Diana's already chaotic world is sent spinning. Jamie can't stand being pregnant. She can't wait to get on with her normal life and give the baby up for adoption. But her yet-to-be-born daughter, Stella, has a fierce will and a destiny to fulfill. And as the plot of Little Beauties unfolds, these three characters' lives become linked in ever more surprising ways.

Joey's Pick  "I can tell you how it happened. It's easy to say how it happened. He walked past a building, and a huge chunk of ice fell off the roof, and it hit him in the head. This is Chaplinesque, right? People start to laugh when I tell them..." As Jay Berman lingers in a coma, his young wife, Lainey, is the only one who believes he will recover. While he lies motionless, she hopes to reach him by offering reminders of the ordinary life they shared--sweet-smelling flowers, his softly textured shirt, spices from their kitchen. And throughout her ordeal, Lainey is sustained by her relationships with two very special women, each of whom teaches her about the enduring bond of friendship and the genuine power of hope.

Chris' Pick   Cautious, conventional Anne shares a deep bond of friendship with the outspoken and eccentric Ruth, building an honest, open relationship that evolves into something deeper when Ruth is diagnosed with cancer.

Joey's Pick   For more than two hundred years, the Owens women had been blamed for everything that went wrong in their Massachusetts town. And Gillian and Sally endured that fate as well. As children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and their exotic concoctions and their crowd of black cats. But all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they shared, even into adulthood, brought them back--almost as if by magic...

Chris' Pick   Amsterdam in the 1630's. Sitting for a portrait is Sophia Sandvoort and her elderly husband Cornelis. They are surrounded by objects showing her husband's piety, as well as a tulip. Cornelis has made money from the speculation on this exotic flower and its bulbs. But as the painter, Jan van Loos, starts to capture Sophia on his canvas, so a slow passion begins to burn...

Joey's Pick   Discovering clues that indicate his beloved wife may not have died accidentally, Paul Iverson begins a perilous search for the truth while attempting to teach his dog, who witnessed the crime, to communicate.

Chris' Pick   Vendela Vida's fearless, critically acclaimed fiction debut follows the unpredictable recovery of a young woman as she tries to make sense of her life after an encounter at gunpoint. Accosted one afternoon in Riverside Park by a man who doesn't want to die alone, Ellis, a young grad student, talks her way out of the situation by reciting poetry to her desperate captor. He lets her go, but is she free? Rejecting the overtures of her kind-hearted boyfriend, the police, and the suitors who would like to save her, Ellis finds herself unable to escape the event. She leaves the city to visit her family; joins her mother on a medical mission to the Philippines. When she returns, Ellis discovers something more about life-perhaps even how to take back her own.

Joey's Pick   While under the care of Alice Goodwin, a neighbor's child drowns in the Goodwins' pond, a devastating accident that has profound repercussions for the entire Goodwin family, in a story set in a small Midwestern farm town.

Chris' Pick   Paula Spencer is a thirty-nine-year-old working-class woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after marriage to an abusive husband and a worsening drinking problem. Paula recalls her contented childhood, the audacity she learned as a teenager, the exhilaration of her romance with Charlo, and the marriage to him that left her feeling powerless. Capturing both her vulnerability and her strength, Roddy Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and unforgettable.

Joey's Pick   Ruth draws on her talent for concocting delectable cakes and desserts when her family begins to disintegrate around her--her husband loses his hospital administration job, her mother moves in after a frightening break-in, her teenage daughter is enduring the misery of adolescence, and her long-estranged father shows up at the door with no place to go.

Chris' Pick   Casey Han's four years at Princeton gave her many things, "But no job and a number of bad habits." Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As she navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives around her, culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots.

Joey's Pick   When a former colonel of the Iranian Air Force and his family purchase a small California home at auction, they are faced with a great conflict as the former owner and her police officer boyfriend fight to get it back at any cost.

Chris' Pick   The story of Helen, an inmate at Sloatsburg, and the horrible crime that led to her life sentence at the prison, is told through the voices of Helen herself, who describes her abusive childhood and how she "saves" her own children; Dr. Louise Forrest, a single mother and head of mental services at the prison; Vangie, an ambitious starlet; and Ike Bradshaw, a young corrections officer.

Joey's Pick   Recently divorced, Anna Dunlap has two passionate attachments: her daughter, four-year-old Molly, and her lover, Leo, the man who makes her feel beautiful -- and sexual -- for the first time. Swept away by happiness and passion, Anna feels she has everything she's ever wanted. Then come the shocking charges that would threaten her new love, her new "family" ... that force her to prove she is a good mother.

Chris' Pick   Lin Kong is a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart. For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young -- a humble and touchingly loyal woman. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway, and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years.

Joey's Pick   Miranda, a beautiful young art student, is the object of obsession here. She becomes the ultimate prize for the psychopathic Frederick, the butterfly collector who has watched her for years. Then one day, chloroform in his pocket, he takes her to his cottage miles from no where. "What happens is both symbolic and all too real, beautiful and sickening at once... as resonant as a myth," wrote one reviewer in the National Review. Read as a psychological thriller, a tale of suspence, or an allegory of a dysfunctional society, The Collector is hauntingly beautiful in its examination of evil.

Chris' Pick   When Olivia, wild-haired and headstrong, makes a terrible mistake, she must turn to the person least likely to help -- her mother, Elaine. Motherhood was a role that Elaine never embraced and her best never amounted to much. But now Olivia faces prosecution for a naive connection to a drug deal and she needs Elaine more than ever. As the days count down and Olivia's future hangs in the balance, Elaine must decide just how much she is willing to give for a second chance with her daughter.

Joey's Pick   Eva never really wanted to be a mother and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklyn. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

Chris' Pick   Hoping to revitalize her lackluster existence by taking a job as a caregiver for a married woman with ALS, college student Bec finds herself profoundly moved by her relationship with her employer, with whom she experiences unanticipated life changes.

Joey's Pick   Fran Benedetto tells a spellbinding story of how a passionate marriage became a nightmare, and what finally makes her run away to start a new life with her son, under a new name. Living in fear of discovery, yet also with increasing confidence, freedom, and hope, Fran unravels the complex threads of family, identity, and desire that shape a woman's life, even as she struggles to create a new one; and Quindlen writes with depth, humor, and insight about the real lives of men and women, the varieties of love, the deep bond between mother and child, the solace of family and friendship.

Chris' Pick   In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. . . . Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of the drowning. . . .

Joey's Pick   Inventive and haunting, How to Make an American Quilt powerfully captures the rites of passage in women's lives. The art of quiltmaking becomes a metaphor for the realities of being a woman in America as the unforgettable stories of seven members of a contemporary California quilting group unfold. And as we come to understand the beauty and complexity of the quilting process — to see its evolution in our country's history — we come to intimately know the history of these women as well.

Chris' Pick   A riveting and deeply involving story of irresistible emotions and irrevocable actions. A century after two women were murdered in a fit of passion on a small island off the coast of New Hampsire, another woman goes to the island to shoot a photo essay about the crime--and finds herself gripped by uncontrollable passions of her own.