In Next to Love by Ellen Feldman, three young women --- Babe, Millie and Grace --- who live in a small town in Massachusetts all send the men they love off to fight in World War II. Not everyone returns, and those who do are profoundly changed, reminding us that the scars of war run deeper than the day that victory is won. This character-rich story begins before the men head out and continues right through the early ’60s.
Dr. Marina Singh is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, who seems to have disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be a valuable new drug. She also hopes to find answers to questions about another friend's death, the state of her company's future, and her own past.
It is 1968. Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in an institution. Deeply in love, they escape and find refuge. But the couple is not alone --- Lynnie has just given birth to a baby girl.
Daelyn Rice is broken beyond repair, and after several suicide attempts, she's determined to get her death right. So she starts visiting a website for "completers." There, Daelyn blogs about her life, uncovering a history of bullying that goes back to kindergarten. When she's not on the Web, Daelyn is at her private school, where she's known as the freak who doesn't talk.
In this emotional collection, characters are shattered and remade by loss. A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s disappearance; a mother mourns her teenage son through his favorite music; and a woman reflects on the year her family collapsed.
AlaÏs, the king of France's sister, is abducted while on her mission for the wily Eleanor of Aquitaine, the former Queen of England, to retrieve hidden letters that, in the wrong hands, could bring down the English king. Now AlaÏs, along with help from the very intriguing leader of the Knights Templar, must unravel a tangled web of family secrets and lies.
