Minnesota, 1911. Nilda Carlson is torn between life in the city of Blackduck and spending time with her family back home on the farm. Her employer, Mrs. Schoenleber, gives her more and more responsibility and experience. Still new to America herself, Nilda focuses on the area's immigrant community, but she'll have to fight to get her ideas accepted by the locals and donors alike. One of her greatest joys is her weekly piano lesson with Fritz Larsson....

Unable to accept or explain his family's newly acquired wealth, his growing interest in sex, and a friend's shoplifting habit, a thirteen-year-old finds the pains in his stomach getting worse and worse.

In this account of two decades in the life of an immigrant household, the fall of communism and the rise of globalization are artfully reflected in the experience of a single family. Ironies, subtle and glaring, are revealed: the Nasmertovs left Odessa for Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a huge sense of finality, only to find that the divide between the old world and the new is not nearly as clear-cut as they thought. The dissolution of the Soviet...

"Women of Unfailing Conviction Virginia, 1864 Therese Jennings cannot abide the thought of her family owning slaves. When her wealthy grandfather dies during the Civil War, leaving his slaves and estate to Therese's widowed mother, Therese flees to Richmond. There she works as a tutor by day and a nurse by night. But when trouble befalls her family, how can she reconcile her duty and beliefs? And where does James Talbot--a long-time family friend--fit...

The time: Some thirty-five years hence. The place: AutoAmerica--governed by "Aunt Nettie," an iBurrito of AI algorithms and the internet, in a land half under water. The people: Divided into the angelfair "Netted," whose fate it is to have jobs and live on high ground, and the mostly coppertoned "Surplus," whose jobs have been stripped and whose sole duty now is to consume, living in plastic houses that talk and multi-colored houseboats at the water's...