Anne Rivers Siddons

A grieving widow takes a solitary road trip to her late husband's favorite getaway on pristine coastal Maine, where she remembers their many happy years of family life, reevaluates the time before they met, and considers her future.

At twelve, Emily Parmenter is left mostly to herself after her mother disappears and her beloved older brother dies. Emily has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise hunting spaniels. It is a meager, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic.

Peyton knows that whatever is wrong with her attractive cousin Nora is more than just the neighbors who sneer at her "unsouthern" ways.

Forced to return to her hometown in Georgia, Mike Winship Singer, a divorced free-lance artist, tries to come to terms with her past and her dying, bigoted father.

When her daughter runs away to her aunt in California, Merritt Fowler of Georgia takes a plane to bring her back, the trip a welcome change from a demanding husband and an equally demanding mother-in-law who is suffering from Alzheimer's. The scene is set for a steamy romance during an earthquake.

Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable comes to live with her cousin's family in the great house on Peachtree Road, and the story of astonishing love and hate between a man and a woman begins.

It isn't easy for sweet young Maude Gascoigne, from a moldering plantation near Charleston, to fit in when her new husband, sterling-silver Peter Chambliss takes her to the summer place. For the first few decades Maude battles it out with her insufferable, hypercritical mother-in-law, the drunken and lecherous husband of her best friend, Amy Potter, and even Peter himself--a depressive, hermetic man who just sails away whenever things get rough. Gradually,...