Akron Public Library

It's December 21, and the Yancey sisters have been called home. When the girls were young, holidays at their family farm were perfect. But as the years unfolded, family bonds fractured, and the three sisters scattered and settled into separate lives. Now the Yancey sisters are coming to spend the holidays with their mother. They're also coming to bury their father. During the sisters' week together, old conflicts surface, new secrets emerge, and the...

After a diving accident, thirty-seven-year-old Ramie Phillips is waking up, trying to understand a voice in the distance: "Wake up!" It's her mother. "You're going to be late for school again. I'm not writing a note this time." Transported back in time to the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Ramie's experience is the the fantasy of every woman who's ever thought, "If I could go back in time, knowing what I know now, I'd do things so differently." On...

Separated by time but united by sacrifice, four women experience love, loss, war, and hope from the rise of Nazism to the fall of the Berlin Wall as they embark on journeys of self-discovery and find themselves to be living testaments to the power of maternal love. Berlin, 1931: Ally Keller, a talented young poet, is alone and scared when she gives birth to a mixed-race daughter she names Lilith. As the Nazis rise to power, Ally knows she must keep...

"A deeply evocative portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a daring visionary who created an inimitable legacy in American art and transformed the city of Boston itself. By the time Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her Italian palazzo-style home as a museum in 1903 to showcase her collection of old masters, antiques, and objects d'art, she was already well-known for scandalizing Boston's polite society. But when Isabella first arrives in Boston in 1861,...

"Marci Thompson always knew what life would be like by her 30th birthday. A large but cozy suburban home shared with a charming husband and two brilliant children. A celebrated career as a writer, complete with mahogany shelves and a summer book tour. A life full of adventure with her friends and family by her side. Instead, Marci lives alone in 480 square feet of converted motel space next to a punk rock band, hundreds of miles from her friends and...

Lillian and her restaurant have a way of drawing people together. Theres Al, the accountant who finds meaning in numbers and ritual; Chloe, a budding chef who hasnt learned to trust after heartbreak; Finnegan, who can disappear into the background despite his massive height; Louise, Als wife, whose anger simmers just below the boiling point; and Isabelle, whose memories are slowly slipping from her grasp. And theres Lillian herself, whose life has...

"Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman - a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back on music. There's too much emotion in it, too much memory and pain." "One morning Fox is observed by Georgie Jutland. Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life...