For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers; the meaning of devotion; and the line between love and hate.

Finally free of her philandering husband, Clare Wilson, in the hospital following a car accident, takes stock of her life and soon finds herself the center of male attention as she transforms herself into a confident single woman who is happy to be on her own.

Meet Faye, Shirley, Marilyn, and Alice: four women with skills, smarts, and secrets--all feeling over the hill and out of the race. But in a moment of delicious serendipity, they meet and realize that they share more than raging hormones and lost dreams. Now, as sex, and men are discussed with double servings of chocolate cake, they vow to help one another...and themselves.--Cover p. [4].

From the outside looking in, Lauren Delaney has a life to envy - a successful career, a solid marriage to a prominent surgeon and two beautiful daughters who are off to good colleges. But on her twenty-fourth wedding anniversary Lauren makes a decision that will change everything. Lauren won't pretend things are perfect anymore. She defies the controlling husband who has privately mistreated her throughout their marriage and files for divorce. And...

From the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance author of Passing, a novel of one mixed-race woman’s far-reaching quest to discover identity and happiness.
 
At twenty-three, Helga Crane teaches in 1920s Georgia at one of the country’s finest colleges for African Americans, and she’s engaged to a fellow teacher. Yet happiness eludes her. And when she can’t take the snobbish, conformist atmosphere one second...

After nearly a decade as a sous-chef in a trendy eatery, Jenna is desperate for a change. She's supported her ex-husband's dreams for so long that she can't even remember her own, until she sees a for-lease sign near her parents' home and envisions her very own cooking store. Her crash course in business is aided by a streetwise store manager and Jenna's adoptive mother. But just as she's gaining a foothold in her new life, in walk her birth parents--aging...

The Ebersol daughters, Leah, and twins Hannah and Mary Beth, face difficult choices as they are forced to choose between the traditional Amish lifestyle and the lure of the world outside their small community. --

When four women meet in a hot tub at a spa, they realize they share a common problem--toxic relatives--and a common solution--each other.

Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. Jessie Sullivan's conventional life has been "molded to the smallest space possible." So when she is called home to cope with her mother's startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself...

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar....