Lisa’s grandfather is turning 100, and her family is gathering from across the country to celebrate at Grandpa Joe’s home—a sprawling apricot orchard in southern California. The orchard is both the heart of their family and a reminder of its past. <br><br>Like many immigrants to America, Joe and his wife, Anna, fled their home country in one of the horrific ethnic cleansings of the twentieth century. They were forced out of Turkey be ...
In 1878, two years after the Greasy Grass Fight that some called Custer’s Last Stand, U.S. soldiers and government contractors rounded up 270 Arapaho people. From the very young to the very old, they were forced to walk from Fort Robinson in western Nebraska across half of what is now the state of Wyoming. Their destination: the Shoshone Indian Reservation. The new home of the Northern Arapaho was a wilderness, but it was theirs and they were gl ...
What do you do when Fate shows up in your rose bed with three-inch canines and retractable claws Robert–not Bob!–Stevenson wakes up one morning in his Vermont home to find a Bengal tiger sitting in his rose garden. Is the tiger real? Or has the illness that has invaded every other part of Robert's body finally and quite literally gone to his head? Real or imaginary, there is no dismounting once you get on the tiger's back. ...
Suddenly driven from their African home by a war in Biafra, the McCall family washes up in a small town in the San Joaquin Valley. The locals assume they must be glad to be back in the "civilized world." But life in America is lonely, desolate and dull, and the children and their  fragile mother hope that one day they will return to the life they left behind. Their father, a hardened oil man, knows better: war ...
Sarah Holloway is a frustrated painter, sketching on the backs of shopping lists and sharing her studio with a washer and dryer. Abandoned by her mother, she has tried to hide her childhood wounds by healing others through art therapy. During her daughter’s first two years, she has faked her way through motherhood with the help of women in her neighborhood playgroup. She hopes she has gotten the hang of it when she learns she ...
A woman discovers she has a rogue body part, one she’s never heard of. As she prepares herself for surgery to remove the offense, she travels to London and finds answers to her questions in unexpected places—a locked room in a museum where jars of Victorian body parts are stored, an early 19th century operating room in the attic of a church, and a diary by a woman whose husband dissected a rhinoceros in their flat. Along the way, she ponders the ...
What do you do when something magical happens…in your own backyard? Linda and Earl are a happy couple. Although married for many years, they have never had children. Still, they are content being together, and watching reruns of “I Love Lucy” keeps them close. That, and a magical garden that never seems to grow what they plant. One day Earl finds a set of infant toes in the loam. He and Linda plant them and watch in amazement as the garden produ ...
Brilliant, homeless and nearly invisible, a young man wanders through Boston, looking for meaning and hope. Extreme mood swings and an unusual outlook on life make it impossible for him to thrive in mainstream society. He finds comfort in laundromats, where he calms himself by watching clothes tumble round and round and round. And in the streets he finds other people like himself, below the radar, laboring to survive. Poignant and buoyant, <i ...
