"From the darkest hours rises life in all its glory ... From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and A Bridge Across the Ocean comes a new novel set in Philadelphia during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which tells the story of a family reborn through loss and love. In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone...

From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and As Bright as Heaven comes a novel about a German American teenager whose life changes forever when her immigrant family is sent to an internment camp during World War II. Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa fourteen-year-old in 1943--aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer....

"September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered onto the scarf he carries...and finds herself caught in a dilemma that compels her to confront the truth about the assumptions she's made. Will what she learns...

Tory Sullivan struggles with the demands of motherhood and her desire for a career. An aspiring writer, she wonders whether she'll ever be able to develop her talent while raising two young children. But perhaps the problem isn't a matter of time, but of Tory. Cathy Flaherty is rediscovering the grins and groans of the dating game. The spunky single mother of three teenagers, she's also learning the urgency of instilling sound values in her children...

"Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story in Milk Blood Heat delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another. A thirteen-year-old meditates on...

The Amish will be the first to tell you they're not perfect. But they do a lot of things right. Forgiveness is one of them. A one-room schoolhouse sat amid the gentle, quaint Amish community in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. It made such a picturesque scene with its wide, welcoming front porch and white clapboard fence, set peacefully among rolling green farm fields and filled with Amish children settling into their desks after running and playing outside....

"Eveline Armstrong is fiercely loved and protected by her powerful clan, but outsiders consider her "touched." Beautiful, fey, with a level, intent gaze, she doesn't speak. No one, not even her family, knows that she cannot hear. Content with her life of seclusion, Eveline has taught herself to read lips and allows the outside world to view her as daft. But when an arranged marriage into a rival clan makes Graeme Montgomery her husband, Eveline accepts...

"In 1913, four men made a months-long journey by dog sled to the base of the tallest mountain in North America. Several groups had already tried but failed to reach the top of a mountain whose size--occupying 120 square miles of the earth's surface --and position as the Earth's northernmost peak of more than 6,000 meters elevation make it one of the world's deadliest mountains. Although its height from base to top is actually greater than Everest's,...

The story of the remarkable public and private journey of Reverend Forrest Church, the scholar, activist, and preacher whose death became a way to celebrate life. Through his pulpit at the prestigious Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York, Reverend Forrest Church became a champion of liberal religion and a leading opponent of the religious right, especially on homophobia and the insistence that the United States is a "Christian nation." An inspired...