Single mom Shandi Pierce's life takes a turn when an enigmatic geneticist saves her and her three-year-old genius son from an armed robber.

What would happen if The Rapture actually took place and millions of people just disappeared from the earth? How would normal people respond? The residents of Mapleton use a variety of coping mechanisms in this thought-provoking novel about love, connection, and loss.

"From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. Starting with the title novella - in which a romantic-minded young art historian is led to (re)discover a terrifying trauma after inheriting property in faraway Cardiff, Maine - through to "The Surviving Child" - which finds the young new wife of a famous poet's widow haunted by the dead poet's...

"This poignant and gently humorous novel reveals how a completely ordinary day can change a whole life"--Provided by publisher.

Spanning from the Wild West to the Great Depression and even into the future, this collection of short stories from the author of Jack Rabbit Smile includes tales of killer machines, a big grizzly bear, shipwrecks, monsters and mystery.

Adah Knepp wants nothing more than to make music. It's all she's ever desired--to sing and play the guitar and write her own songs. That's a dream that will never come true in the confines of her strict Amish community. But then she meets Jackson Hart, and all of a sudden she finds the chance for a different kind of life. A real stage, a real guitar, and a real opportunity to sing her songs to a real audience! But pursuing her dreams means turning...

"You don't have to look very hard at Drew Silver to see that mistakes have been made. His fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. He lives in the Versailles, an apartment building filled almost exclusively with divorced men like him, and makes a living playing in wedding bands. His ex-wife, Denise, is about to marry a guy Silver can't quite bring himself to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter...

"From the author of Norwegian by Night, a novel about two men on a misbegotten quest to save the girl they failed to save decades before 1991. Near Checkpoint Zulu, one hundred miles from the Kuwaiti border, Thomas Benton meets Arwood Hobbes. Benton is a British journalist who reports from war zones in part to avoid his lackluster marriage and a daughter he loves but cannot connect with; Arwood is a midwestern American private who might be an insufferable...

"Ada escaped her family's self-enclosed world to elope with a mysterious stranger. Five months later, she's a widow ina strange new world. Ada was born into a fringe religious sect named for her father, The Prophet. But her lifelong habit of absolute obedience was shattered when she fled the family compound to elope with photographer Julian Goetz. Katherine Walker's marriage was a sham. She and Will rarely spoke without yelling -- and never touched....

Newly independent widow Emily Maxwell dreams of visits by grandchildren and mourns changes in her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood before realizing an inner strength to pursue developing opportunities.