The Only Girl in the World describes the author's harrowing upbringing by fanatic parents, who raised her in isolation through traumatic disciplinary exercises designed to "eliminate weakness" and recounts how she eventually escaped with the help of an outsider.

"Melody Beattie's compassionate and insightful look into codependency--the concept of losing oneself in the name of helping another--has guided millions of readers toward the understanding that they are powerless to change anyone but themselves and that caring for the self is where healing begins. Is someone else's problem your problem? If, like so many others, you've lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to a loved one's self-destructive...

"Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's...

A series of tragedies, including the death of her baby brother, her parent's divorce, her mother's nervous breakdown, and her own rape at the age of thirteen, leaves Dolores Price wounded both mentally and physically, but she miraculously finds the strength to give herself one more chance at life and love.

"Meg works for a casino in LA, catching cheaters and popping a few too many pain pills to cope, following a far different path than her sister Haley, a famous actress. But suddenly reports surface of Haley dying at the remote rehab facility where she had been forced to go to get her addictions under control. There are whispers of suicide, but Meg can't believe it. She decides that the best way to find out what happened to her sister is to check in...

Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks -- waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why -- their stories were chalked up to 'wild female imagination.' Women Talking is an imagined response to...

Richard Russo has celebrated Monica Wood's fiction as 'thoroughly captivating...warm and wise and beautifully written,' and Andre Dubus III praised it as 'luminous and graceful...entertaining yet transcendent.' Any Bitter Thing, Wood's brilliant new novel, is her breakout book, a timely, gripping, and compassionate tale of family, faith, and deeply hidden truths. One of its greatest strengths is its continuous ability to defy expectations.

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In Coney Island, Brooklyn, Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow, wants nothing more than to lose weight and appear on a television game show. She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend Marion and his best friend Tyrone, have devised an illicit short cut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin. Entranced by the gleaming visions of thier futures, these four convince themselves...

For nearly a year Beth has been planning a new beginning, one with a new look, new name, and a new city. One small slip and her violent husband will find her. A couple hundred miles away, Jeffrey returns home from a work trip to find his wife, Sabine, is missing. She's taken almost nothing with her; her abandoned car is the only evidence the police have, and all signs point to foul play. The detective on the case will stop at nothing to find out what...

Returning as a successful artist to the home of the family that adopted him, Seth Quinn is intrigued by independent newcomer Dru Whitcomb Banks, who is hesitant to trust Seth, while dark secrets from the past threaten the entire Quinn family.