Following the death of her husband, Betta Nolan fulfills her promise to him to move to a small town and build a new life for herself, as she strives to cope with her grief and find pleasure and solace in the ordinary things of everyday life.

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the...

A young woman changes the lives of the residents of a small Midwestern town during the 1950s.

Thirteen-year-old Alexander Armsworth sees lights in the barn, is identified by Blossom Culp's spiritualist mother as gifted, and begins a series of Mississippi River adventures accompanied by his aged Uncle Miles and a curious female ghost.

His friendship with Peter Cartwright, a Methodist circuit-rider evangelist, enables thirteen-year-old Gil to pursue his dream of locating his mother who was kidnapped by the Sauk Indians during the War of 1812.

George and Nan Fremont are renowned among their neighbors for their meticulously manicured backyard. Now that the weather's warming up, it's time for them to give their neglected front yard a much-needed makeover. But a bevy of meddlers stonewall their latest project before they can even dig in. Dr. Brockheimer is a little too enamored with the Fremonts' gardening prowess. Miss Price seems to be hiding something about the history of their property....

When Lumen Fowler looks back on her childhood, she wouldn't have guessed she would become a kind suburban wife, a devoted mother. In fact, she never thought she would escape her small and peculiar hometown. When We Were Animals is Lumen's confessional: as a well-behaved and over-achieving teenager, she fell beneath the sway of her community's darkest, strangest secret. For one year, beginning at puberty, every resident "breaches" during the full moon....

It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen...