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Every August, four women 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. 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 group slowly drifts apart. Years later, after a new marriage reunites them and they come together on a remote barrier island off the South Carolina coast, the women make startling discoveries that will change them in ways they never expected.

Anita Mostyn feels the need to take a holiday from her life. As a child, she was dismissed by her parents in favour of her self-confident brothers, and as an adult, her choices are disapproved of - the small art gallery she works for, the friends she makes, the men she sees. Mossy - lumbered with a childhood nickname that stuck - is never the 'fixed point'; not for her most recent lover, or for the mother whose approval she craves. Instead, she lives on the edges of things. On a whim, she takes up an offer to scout for holiday properties in Bulgaria, escaping the impending second wedding of her perfect brother - and a horrifying episode in her past. Poignant and absurd, sharp and wry, Janet Davey's luminous prose charts the complications of family relationships with insight and extraordinary tenderness. As Anita navigates difficult waters, we begin to understand her past, and, little by little, see her come through.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The farmer's daughter
• Brown Dog Redux
• The games of night.

• The father / William Dean Howells
• The old-maid aunt / Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
• The grandmother / Mary Heaton Vorse
• The daughter-in-law / Mary Stewert Cutting
• The school-girl / Elizabeth Jordan
• The son-in-law / John Kendrick Bangs
• The married son / Henry James
• The married daughter / Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
• The mother / Edith Wyatt
• The school-boy / Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
• Peggy / Alice Brown
• The friend of the family / Henry Van Dyke.

The anonymous, middle-aged narrator of "Perfect Tense" is a man broken on the wheel of office life - the great beige wheel of grinding routine, the uniform grey carpets, the endless buff envelopes. Driven by the entropy of the office, out of step with the zeitgeist, he has begun to question his whole generation, and his own empty, under-achieved life in particular. Recounting his day at the office - one particular day, which seems to mimic the coffee-mug slogan, 'Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life' - the narrator scrutinises the arcana of his environment like an urban anthropologist, looking for aesthetic or spiritual purpose and finding only print-outs and suspension files, spider plants and yuccas and polystyrene cups. In this short, brilliant novel, we are taken on a terrifyingly familiar tour of office life which is at once hilarious and profound - the comedy of recognition matched by deepening urban anxiety, as if T.S. Eliot had been blessed with Groucho Marx's comic timing. One man's unravelling philosophical crisis amid the leaving parties and sandwiches becomes, in the hands of Michael Bracewell, a metaphysical search for order and purpose deep in the back of a desk drawer.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Situated in a remote outpost in West Virginia at the turn of the last century, the story that Lenore McComas Coberly tells in Sarah's Girls is one of place, people, and unquenchable spirit. In this fictionalized account of her recent ancestors, Coberly masterfully traces the journeys of their lives, their dreams, and their hardships over the course of the twentieth century. At its center is the story of Lena, who returns to care for her dead sister's daughters, giving up the promise of a life that can spare her the adversity rural living guarantees. The author goes back to Big Ugly Creek, the place where her grandparents met--and the place whose memory she cannot leave. Using the stories she was told in her childhood as a bridge to the past, Coberly uncovers facts about her family history from documents that have made their way from one generation to another and the truth from the inherent understanding she has of these people who are so close to her. But Sarah's Girls is not about the author; it is about the people and a place she loves. It is fiction written to tell the deeper truth about the hold West Virginia--its mountains and its valleys--has on its people.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Set against the backdrop of the tube bombings in London in 2005, Underground Fugue interweaves the stories of four characters who are dislocated by shock waves of personal loss, political violence, and, ultimately, betrayal. It's April and Esther has left New York for London, partly to escape her buckling marriage, and partly to care for her dying mother; Lonia, Esther's mother, is haunted by memories of fleeing Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II; Javad, their next-door neighbor and an Iranian neuroscientist, struggles to connect with his college-aged son; and Amir, Javad's son, is seeking both identity and escape in his illicit exploration of the city's forbidden spaces. As Esther settles into life in London, a friendship develops among them. But when terrorists attack the London transit system in July, someone goes missing, and the chaos that follows both fractures the possibilities for the future, and reveals the deep fault lines of the past. With nuanced clarity and breathtaking grandeur, Margot Singer's Underground Fugue is an elegant, suspenseful, and deeply powerful debut"-- Provided by publisher.

Eustace is undisputed patriarch of the Farquhar family. That is, he would be if everyone stopped mumbling, let him get on with his shaving and find his way downstairs. It's not Henry's fault that he snores and that his marriage has collapsed. Or that he failed to get into the cricket team. But he has made up for it and is now a faster motorist than ever he was bowler. He is a good father too and one day, when he wakes up from day-dreaming, his son Kenneth will thank him. It is good that Anne sleeps with a whistle in her mouth - how else could she terrify the burglars? As for Mathilda she would love to like her mother, but prefers going for long walks with the dog. But what will happen to them all if the dog dies? A devastating postscript follows the story. Placing this eccentric family in isolation after two world wars and at the beginning of our aggressive financial culture, it turns comedy into tragedy. This novel brings a very personal addition to the biographer's remarkable career.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Nora and Theresa Flynn are twenty-one and seventeen when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan--a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand. Fifty years later, Nora is the matriarch of a big Catholic family with four grown children: John, a successful, if opportunistic, political consultant; Bridget, privately preparing to have a baby with her girlfriend; Brian, at loose ends after a failed baseball career; and Patrick, Nora's favorite, the beautiful boy who gives her no end of heartache. Estranged from her sister and cut off from the world, Theresa is a cloistered nun, living in an abbey in rural Vermont. Until, after decades of silence, a sudden death forces Nora and Theresa to confront the choices they made so long ago."-- Provided by publisher.

• The rescue mission
• Good to go
• Frost line
• Last time for old times' sake
• The small salvation
• The bottom of the glass
• Now that it's spring
• Manhattans
• The hay behind the house
• I am the news
• Something along those lines
• Metal fatigue
• Patrols
• The barrens
• Sense of direction.

• Rain
• Charity work
• Dancing with time
• What I leaned from Clara
• His mother, his daughter
• Woman made of sand
• Madonna at Monterchi
• At the "Changing Careers" Conference
• The provider
• Chicken livers
• Discipline and will.

• Safety man
• I demand to know where you're taking me
• Big me
• Prodigal
• Passengers, remain calm
• The illustrated encyclopedia of the animal kingdom
• Among the missing
• Prosthesis
• Here's a little something to remember me by
• Late for the wedding
• Falling backwards
• Burn with me.

"Stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place."--Jacket.

• The daughter's lamentation
• The mother's mirror
• The father's blessing
• The son's burden
• Epilogue of the progeny.