An Indiana woman whose world was shattered in one fateful night spends the entirety of this meditative literary debut/sleepy thriller unraveling its events. Twenty-two-year-old Maggie's crumbling marriage takes its final blow when she is beaten nearly to death in her idyllic farmhouse, and Nate, her domineering and abusive husband, is put in prison for the crime. Cross-cutting between the mid-1990s, before the assault, and the novel's present in 2002,...

A series of family tragedies leaves fourteen-year-old Dove, her younger sister, Molly, and their baby brother, Little Ellis, in the care of their stepmother, seventeen-year-old Crystal. Born into a hardscrabble world of poverty and abandonment, Dove must take on much of the responsibility for her siblings after Crystal turns to their Bible-thumping Aunt Bett for help.

A gun accident tests the values that unite a family.

Thirteen interrelated short stories delivering an entertaining glimpse into the dysfunctional lives of a group of hoity-toity Connecticut think tank intellectuals as they philosophize over wine and cheese, fall in and out of love and go about their daily lives with reckless abandon. Most of the action takes place in the kitchen of the institute's director, Leslie Shakespeare, while Leslie's wife alternatively entertains and lambastes their friends....

Returning with her teenage son to Hawke's Cove, where she spent her childhood summers and fell in love with Grainger Egan, Kiley Harris wonders if she should admit to Grainger that she made a mistake when she left him for another man.