"Ann Patchett, the New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth and State of Wonder, returns with her most powerful novel to date: a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. "'Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was?' I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House in the broad daylight...

When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by their new mother and hope that she will stay.

A groundbreaking way of understanding the tensions that define relations between women and their stepchildren. Half of all women in the United States will live with or marry a man with children. And what woman with stepchildren has not--in order to defuse the often overwhelming challenges of the role--referred to herself as a "stepmonster"? Wednesday Martin unlocks the emotional mysteries of why stepmothers think and feel and act the way they do....

Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead...

While working at a summer stock theater, eleven-year-old Zack and his stepmother encounter the ghost of one of Connecticut's most notorious criminals.

IT WAS JUST SUPPOSED TO BE A FAMILY VACATION. A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT CHANGED EVERYTHING. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE CAPABLE OF UNTIL THEY COME FOR YOUR FAMILY. After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. A working vacation overseas seems like the perfect way to bring the new family together, but once they’re deep in the Australian outback, the jet-lagged and...

"At sixteen, Mina's mother is dead, her magician father is vicious, and her silent heart has never beat with love for anyone--has never beat at all, in fact, but she'd always thought that fact normal. She never guessed that her father cut out her heart and replaced it with one of glass. When she moves to Whitespring Castle and sees its king for the first time, Mina forms a plan: win the king's heart with her beauty, become queen, and finally know...

Princess Winter is admired for her grace, kindness and beauty, despite the scars on her face. She's said to be even more breath-taking than her stepmother, Queen Levana... When Winter develops feelings for the handsome palace guard, Jacin, she fears the evil Queen will crush their romance before it has a chance to begin. But there are stirrings against the Queen across the land. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might...

A woman marries into a ready-made family and learns the true meaning of motherhood.

Recasts the tale of Snow White, setting it in West Virginia in the 1940s with a stepmother who is a snake-handler.