"Sometimes life is so hard and then, bingo, it's like happiness is pushing at your back, waiting to come out of your front ..." On the hot Texas army base she calls home, Katie spends the lazy days of her summer waiting: waiting to grow up; waiting for Dickie Mack to fall in love with her; waiting for her breasts to blossom; waiting for the beatings to stop. Since their mother died, Katie and her older sister, Diane, have been struggling to understand...

Sharing nothing in common except their 16-year-old daughter, divorced parents John and Irene reconnect in the wake of a devastating tragedy and discover things about each other that they had not revealed during their marriage.

It is the summer of 1964. In Tupelo, Mississippi, the town of Elvis's birth, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently--and violently--across the state. But in Paige Dunn's small, ramshackle house, there are more immediate concerns. Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is nonetheless determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her...

Beloved author Elizabeth Berg tells the story of the recently widowed Helen Ames and of her twenty-seven-year-old daughter Tessa. Helen is shocked to discover that her mild-mannered and loyal husband had been leading a double life. The Ames's had saved money for a happy retirement, planned in minute detail, but that money has disappeared in several big withdrawals spent by Helen's husband before he died.

A 36-year-old Massachusetts woman, desperate for a baby, asks a gay friend to make her pregnant. He obliges and they live together, but his attraction to men makes her realize her future is as a single mother.

Samantha's husband has left her, and, after a spree of overcharging at Tiffany's, she settles down to reconstuct a life for herself and her eleven-year-old son.

"This beautiful novel tells the love story of young Arthur Moses and Nola, and how a young man grew up to become the wise old man known as Arthur trulove. Set in the 1950s in the warm community of Mason, Missouri, Arthur is a shy, unathletic teenage boy, in love with the most beautiful girl in his class. He is thrilled when they become friends, but he wants more than friendship. Alas, he learns that Nola has a crush on the wrong Moses--Arthur's older...