In 1960, Billie Valentine is a young housewife living in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, treading water in a dull marriage and caring for two adopted daughters. Summers spent with the girls at their lakeside camp in Vermont are her one escape - from her husband's demands, from days consumed by household drudgery, and from the nagging suspicion that life was supposed to hold something different. Then a new family moves in across the street. Ted and...

Evelyn Couch, a woman caught in the slump of middle age, gains a new outlook on life when she befriends eighty-year-old Ninny Threadgoode who tells her the story of the Whistle Stop Cafe and the two women who ran it in the 1930s, best friends Idgie and Ruth.

This memoir is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother by the author of "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit"--winner of the Whitbread First Novel award and the inspiration behind the award-winning BBC television adaptation "Oranges."

"The author of the "swoon-worthy debut" (Harper's Bazaar) The Charm Offensive returns with a festive romantic comedy about a woman who fakes an engagement with her landlord...only to fall for his sister. One year ago, recent Portland transplant Ellie Oliver had her dream job in animation and a Christmas Eve meet-cute with a woman at a bookstore that led her to fall in love over the course of a single night. But after a betrayal the next morning and...

"Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause - despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss - until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie's mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris's will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she's never heard of. In an effort to run from her own grief and...

The author recalls her experiences as a teenager in an unlicensed Mormon treatment program intended to cure her of lesbianism, detailing the beatings, verbal abuse, and cruelty she endured, as well as the historic legal case surrounding it.

With the threat of deportation looming over her father--in spite of his hard-won citizenship and disavowal of Communism--seventeen-year-old American-born Chinese Lily Hu pursues a relationship with her Caucasian classmate Kath. Includes author's note.

"On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: 'You exist too much, ' she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes...

A young Nigerian girl, displaced during their civil war, begins a powerful love affair with another refugee girl from a different ethnic community until the pair are discovered and must learn the cost of living a lie amidst taboos and prejudices. Ijeoma, a young Nigerian girl displaced during their civil war, begins a powerful love affair with another refugee girl from a different ethnic community. When the pair are discovered, she must learn the...

Nature is out of balance in the human kingdom. The sun hasn't shone in years. The crops are failing, and families are starving. Worst yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. The people's survival hangs in the balance. To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and the destinies of two seventeen year-old girls become entwined when they are chosen to go on a dangerous and unheard of journey to Taninli, the city of the Fairy Queen....