Contemporary Fiction

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addictbrother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal.

When her flailing department lands on the university's chopping block, Professor Naya Turner's friends convince her to shed her frumpy cardigan for an evening on the town. For one night her focus will stray from her demanding job. When she meets a charming stranger in town on business, Naya starts to rebuild her confidence, which was left toppled by her abusive ex-boyfriend. Soon she's flirting with the chance at a more serious romantic relationship - except nothing can be that easy. The complicated strings around her dating Jake might destroy her career \.

Morgan, an elite track athlete, is forced to transfer high schools late in her senior year after it turns out being queer is against her private Catholic school's code of conduct. There, she meets Ruby, who has two hobbies: tinkering with her baby blue 1970 Ford Torino and competing in local beauty pageants, the latter to live out the dreams of her overbearing mother. The two are drawn to each other and can't deny their growing feelings.

No one has ever asked Izzy what she wants. She's about to change all that...

Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G.H. are an older couple, it's their house, and they've arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area, with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service, it's hard to know what to believe.

Transitioning from her Jewish faith to dieting to maintain an illusion of existential control, Rachel bonds with an Orthodox woman at a frozen yogurt shop before embarking on a journey of food, desire and spiritual fulfillment.

In the middle of the night, Sheriff Winston Barnes learns that a plane has crashed at a coastal airfield, with neither pilot nor cargo in evidence and a local man found shot dead, but as Winston investigates, a devious challenger threatens his reelectionas sheriff, his daughter returns home with heartbreak of her own, and long-submerged racial bitterness comes to the fore.

Lil and Frank married young, having bonded over how they both lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they'd lost prematurely. Now, after many years in Boston, they have retired in North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries-perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know.

Derailed by the sudden passing of her husband of thirty years, an artist on the brink of a gallery opening struggles to pick up the pieces of her life before discovering harrowing evidence of her husband's affair.