Anne Rivers Siddons

"Every August, four women would gather together to spend a week at the beach, renting a new house each year. The ritual began when they were in their twenties and their husbands were in medical school, and became a mainstay of every summer thereafter. Their only criteria was oceanfront and isolation, their only desire to strengthen their far-flung friendships. They called themselves the Girls of August. But when one of the Girls dies tragically, the...

Left virtually alone after the disappearance of her mother and death of her beloved older brother, Emily Parmenter has built a life around the plantation where her remote father and hunter-obsessed brothers raise their legendary hunting spaniels. It is a narrow world, but to Emily it has magic: deep-sea dolphins who play in Sweetwater Creek; her extraordinary bond with the dogs she trains; her almost mystic communion with her own spaniel, Elvis;

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A smalltown girl, Smoky O'Donnell, moves to Atlanta to work for a magazine and becomes involved with three men: a rebellious photographer, a black freedom fighter, and the scion of an aristocratic Southern family. The civil rights movement serves as a background. By the author of Hill Towns.

When Catherine Gaillard finally ends her self-imposed isolation in Tennessee for a trip to Italy, she finds that the travel transforms her, and her liberation threatens her husband.

Finding the family she has always longed for through her marriage, Anny vows with her new friends that they will live together in old age, a promise that is tested in the wake of painful challenges.

Nora Findlay, a motherless child who breaks all the rules, arrives in Lytton, Georgia, in 1961 at the age of thirteen and proceeds to shake up the town with her rebellious ways.