Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain "devoted"-as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters' long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn't understand how Frances can ignore the past their father's presence revives,...

Even as a child, Suzanne Berne understood the source of her father's terrible melancholy: he'd lost his mother when he was a little boy. Decades later, with her father now elderly and ailing, she decides to try to uncover the woman who continues to haunt him. Every family has a missing person, someone who died young or disappeared, leaving a legacy of loss. Aided by vintage photographs and a box of old keepsakes, Berne sets out to fill in her grandmother's...

"A 'brilliantly done' (Sunday Times, London) comedy of manners that explores the unease behind the manicured lawns of suburban America from the Orange Prize-winning author of A Crime in the Neighborhood. Littlefield, Massachusetts, named one of the Ten Best Places to Live in America, full of psychologists and college professors, is proud of its fine schools, its girls' soccer teams, its leafy streets, and charming village center. Yet no sooner has...

A girl annoyed by a neighbor flirting with her mother accuses him of sexual abuse and murder. She is Martha, 10, and in the summer of 1972 the suburb of Spring Hill in Washington is more than ready to believe her, a child having been raped and murdered. The novel examines what can happen when a child's testimony is the only lead in a crime and what prompts a child to point an accusing finger. A debut in fiction.