"After a failed apprenticeship, working her way up to head housekeeper of a posh London hotel is more than Sara Smythe ever thought she'd make of herself. But when a chance encounter with Theodore Camden, one of the architects of the grand New York apartment house The Dakota, leads to a job offer, her world is suddenly awash in possibility--no mean feat for a servant in 1884. In 1985, Bailey Camden is desperate for new opportunities. Two generations...

Betty Weissman loses her elegant New York apartment when her husband of nearly fifty years divorces her for what he says are irreconcilable differences, but is inactuality another woman. She and her two grown daughters who quite unexpectedly find themselves the middle-aged products of a broken home and whose own lives are in varying states of disrepair and confusion regroup in a small, run-down Westport, Connecticut, beach cottage. As they wrestle...

A young sophisticated Chicagoan falls for the owner of a farm on Johns Island, a lush Lowcountry paradise off the coast of South Carolina-- trading the bustle of a cosmopolitan city for the vagaries of a small southern town.

Babbitt is set in the modern Midwestern city of Zenith. George F. Babbitt, a 46- year-old real estate broker, enjoys all the modern conveniences available to a prosperous middle-class businessman, yet he is dissatisfied with his life. When the novel opens, Babbitt has begun to regularly indulge in fantasies about a fairy girl who makes him feel like a gallant youth. Babbitt's family consists of his three children, Verona, Ted, and Tinka, and his dowdy,...