Christopher Newman, a wealthy American businessman, descends on Europe in search of a wife to make his fortune complete. In Paris he is introduced to Claire de Cintré, daughter of the ancient House of Bellegarde, and to Valentin, her charming young brother. His bid for Claire's hand receives an icy welcome from the heads of the family, an elder brother and their formidable mother, the old Marquise. Can they stomach his manners for the sake of...

Raised separately from her identical twin Nikoletta, Ariadne, unaware of her family's vast wealth, agrees to take the place of the twin she has never met as part of a scheme concocted by her late father's board of directors.

After the death of her daughter, Julie housesits the Mailbu home of her aunt and uncle where she finds herself drawn to Roberto, the handsome man who oversees the lemon orchard and whose daughter was lost but never found.

Unlike the other Birthmothers in her utopian community, teenaged Claire forms an attachment to her baby, feeling a great loss when he is taken to the Nurturing Center to be adopted by a family unit.

Collects essays about the loss of friendship featuring relationships that dissolved over a gradual period, sudden breakups, or otherwise eroded powerful bonds between once inseparable companions.

In this book, the author, a sociologist examines the exits we make in our lives: exits big and small, extraordinary and ordinary, ritualized and unceremonious, quick and protracted, painful and liberating. Exits are braided into the arc of our individual development and laced into our intergenerational relationships, shaped by economic crisis, global mobility, and technological innovations. But even though exits are all around us, we tend to diminish...

Focuses on the thoughts, feelings, and emotional problems of children whose parents are divorcing, accompanied by brief stories of young people in such situations.

"Jen has dumped Andy, and he's handling the breakup in exactly the way all his friends and family might have expected: very, very badly. Crashing at his mother's house and obsessively photographing his hairline, Andy embraces the rites and rituals of every breakup-the ill-advised decision to move onto a houseboat, the forced merriment of a lads' night out, the accidental late-night text to the ex-all resulting in a never-ending shame spiral. Even...

Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister Mabel have no one but each other--with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and reverberate...