Xe Sands

Marrying an economics professor she met while catering an East Hampton dinner party, Angela finds her tragic past coming under scrutiny at the same time she is asked to defend her husband against wrongful accusations. "When Angela met Jason Powell while catering a dinner party in East Hampton, she assumed their romance would be a short-lived fling, like so many relationships between locals and summer visitors. To her surprise, Jason, a brilliant...

"The newest heartwarming novel from the New York Times bestselling author tells the story of two friends who make a promise to face their deepest hopes and greatest fears by agreeing to stop waiting to lose weight and start living now. Marley, Georgia, and Emerson met at fat camp as teens, and they never would have survived it without each other. They bonded against the disapproval of their family and friends by loving each other for who they were...

"One step forward. Two steps back. The Tufts scholarship that put Nora Stuart on the path to becoming a Boston medical specialist was a step forward. Being hit by a car and then overhearing her boyfriend hit on another doctor when she thought she was dying? Two major steps back. Injured in more ways than one, Nora feels her carefully built life cracking at the edges. There's only one place to land: home. But the tiny Maine community she left fifteen...

As elderly women, sisters Twiss and Milly live alone in the house where they grew up in Spring Green, Wis. They spend their days tending to injured birds and roaming their land, lost in memories. For Milly, there is the constant reminder of what could have been. Twiss spent her childhood happily trailing behind their golf-pro father, but Milly dreamed about a family and children that never happened. There was hope for a young Milly, until an accident...

When Iola Anne Poole, an old-timer on Hatteras Island, passes away in her bed at ninety-one, the struggling young mother in her rental cottage, Tandi Jo Reese, finds eighty-one carefully decorated prayer boxes, one for each year, spanning from Iola's youth to her last days. Hidden in the boxes is the story of a lifetime, written on random bits of paper.

In 1956, Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a desirable Boston suburb. Ava is beautiful, divorced, Jewish, and a working mom. She finds her neighbors less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood--in the throes of Cold War paranoia--seizes the opportunity to further ostracize Ava and her son. Years...

In the wake of his wife's murder, agent Grady Shields turned his back on the FBI - and everything else - to retreat into the vast solitude of Montana, grieve for his lost love, and forget the world. But after years in seclusion, his sister's wedding draws him to St. Dennis, a peaceful town on the Chesapeake Bay. Though he swears he isn't interested in finding love again, Grady can't ignore the mutual sparks that fly when he meets Vanessa Keaton. Although...

Dallas MacGregor is living the Hollywood dream. At thirtysomething, she's an award-winning actress beloved by the public and bound for even bigger success. But when her soon-to-be-ex-husband, producer Emilio Baird, is caught in a sex scandal, Dallas's charmed life turns tabloid nightmare. Determined to shield her young son, Cody, from the ugly uproar, Dallas seeks refuge in sleepy St. Dennis, Maryland - the Chesapeake Bay town where her happiest childhood...

English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in 1930s New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide. Then he encounters the famous and controversial American anthropologist Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, who have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo....

"In The Lightkeepers, we follow Miranda, a nature photographer who travels to the Farallon Islands, an exotic and dangerous archipelago off the coast of California, for a one-year residency capturing the landscape. Her only companions are the scientists studying there, odd and quirky refugees from the mainland living in rustic conditions; they document the fish populations around the island, the bold trio of sharks called the Sisters that hunt the...