Fifty-year-old artist's model Helen Knightly, worn down by years of dealing with her depressed and needy mother, gives in to the temptation to smother the now old and senile Clair and spends the next twenty-four hours feeling both liberated by what she has done, and tormented by her memories of the past and expectations for the future.

San Francisco ghostwriter Ruth Young finally begins to understand her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother LuLing's preoccupation with ghosts and curses when she reads Luling's writings of her dark backwoods childhood in 1920s China--where LuLing's mute, disfigured nursemaid committed suicide, and a nearby cave held what may have been the bones of the lost ancient hominid Peking Man.

Olivia, haunted her entire life with the memory of her mother's murder, awakens old dangers when she teams up with writer Noah Brady in an effort to relive the events of that horrible night when she discovered her father leaning over the body of her dead mother.

Sixth-grader Sugar and her mother lose their beloved house and experience the harsh world of homelessness.

Calla Lily enjoys a blissful childhood in La Luna, Louisiana, learning her mother's healing ways and experiencing the joys of new love, until Calla's heart is broken, prompting her to move to New Orleans, where she discovers her destiny and begins to fully understand her special powers.

After sixteen years of marriage, Mattie Hart's husband Jake leaves her for another woman, leaving her to cope with her teenage daughter's anger and a health crisis that will tear all their lives apart.

Ten years after finding fame with a novel based on her own life, Cannie Shapiro has faded from the spotlight, content to write science fiction under a pen name and raise her daughter, Joy, but as Joy prepares for her bat mitzvah and begins to ask questions about Cannie's past, Cannie realizes she cannot hide forever if she wants to be truly happy.

20-year-old Sophie is preparing to marry at her mother's hotel on a Greek island. She has a carefree life, a loving fiancee, and great friends. She is only missing one thing: a father. By reading her mother's diary she discovers that she has three possible fathers. Sophie secretly invites all three men to the wedding in a desperate bid to discover which of them is her father. But not all goes according to plan. Now, old loves are re-kindled, new loves...

Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller, living in a world in which the Bill of Rights has been revoked, is able to keep a low profile until her mother is arrested for noncompliance and she realizes the officer responsible is her first love, Chase Jennings.