Feeling at the top of her game when she is suddenly diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease, Harvard psychologist Alice Howland struggles to find meaning and purpose in her life as her concept of self gradually slips away.

Takes a loving swipe at the charged political atmosphere of Greenwich Village in the early seventies. Elegant art history professor Carole Hanratty insists brains transcend lust—until she crashes into Ilse, a revolutionary feminist flush with the arrogance of youth. Blazing with rhetoric, their romance is a sexual and ideological inferno. Ilse campaigns to get Carole to join The Movement, but forty-four-year-old Carole and her zany peers have twenty...

Jane Howard is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo, and she becomes pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise--but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world. Just when she has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for some sort of personal...

Every day of her life Julia Rich lives with the memory of a horrible accident she caused long ago. In the years since, she has tried to hide her guilt in the quiet routine of teaching at a small South Carolina college, avoiding close relationships with family and would-be friends. But one day a phone call from Carmen, a niece she has never met, disrupts her carefully controlled world. Carmen is a study in contrasts--comical yet wise, sunny yet contemplative,...

Sheriff Devin MacKade gets another chance with the woman he has loved for years, Cassie Connor, and Shane MacKade unexpectedly becomes a one-woman man when he meets shy academic Rebecca McKnight.

When one of her students is killed in a hit-and-run on River Road, it raises memories of Nan Lewis's own daughter, killed in a similar accident six years prior. And because Nan has damage to her car after hitting a deer while driving home from a faculty holiday party that same night, she becomes a suspect. In the days following the accident, Nan finds herself shunned by the community--and begins to suspect that the two accidents are connected.

A freshman in college, Mallory is reeling from her mother's recent death. She sees the woman for the first time at the university's gym, immediately entranced; before long, they begin sleeping together in secret. Self-possessed, successful, brilliant, and aloof: the woman is everything Mallory wants... and wants to be. Mallory retreats from the rest of the world, solidifying a sense of aloneness that has both haunted and soothed her since childhood...

"For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student...

"A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises--and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself...In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, PhillipaMaakestad--long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter--grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching...

"On the heels of a difficult break-up and a devastating diagnosis, Shakespearian scholar Lizzie Delford decides to take one last lavish vacation on Elba, the sun-kissed island off the Italian coast, with her best friend and his movie-star boyfriend. Once settled into a luxurious seaside resort, Lizzie has to make big decisions about her future, and she needs the one thing she may be running out of: time. She leaves the yacht-owners and celebrities...