"The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays"--Provided by publisher. ""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At...

The text message arrives in the small hours of the night. It's just three words: I need you. Isa drops everything, takes her baby daughter and heads straight to Salten. She spent the most significant days of her life at boarding school on the marshes there, days which still cast their shadow over her. At school Isa and her three best friends used to play the Lying Game. They competed to convince people of the most outrageous stories. Now, after seventeen...

In this classic adventure novel, first published in 1873, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a?20,000 wager set by his friends at the Reform Club - and he is determined not to lose. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, the reserved Englishman and his manservant immediately set off.

Isabelle McAvoy (58), private art consultant in New York City. The first half of the book focuses on her past, having three daughters with three different men and following her through each of those relationships. Her first love was a reclusive American living in France, much older than her, who was always a part of their daughter's life, though they never married. Her second husband went to prison for fraud when Isabelle was pregnant with her second...

When eleven-year-old Rigel Harman's parents divorce, she and her sisters must move from the Alaskan wilderness to suburban Connecticut, and while she yearns to return in a year, she eventually realizes she must move forward.

After his wife is convicted of murder and faces life behind bars, college professor John Brennan seeks ex-convict Damon Pennington, who staged his own escape, to help him break her out of prison.

Three American women, new friends, all older single women, have taken a lease on a stone manse in Tuscany. They are escaping, reinventing, and reevaluating the fates expected of them as aging women in America. They are novices in a foreign culture, figuring out the day to day, but what they share is a gusto for life and a sturdy if indefinite determination to thrive. Released from their former lives, encouraging each other, and finding a lot of 'why...

Three ordinary men find themselves completely out of their element, holding a young girl hostage without the slightest idea of what to do next. They are already guilty of kidnapping and robbery. It is only a matter of time before they find out just what else they are capable of. For these four people, three days will decide their fate, between freedom and prison, innocence and guilt, and life and death.

Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about...