"Empress Elizabeth of Austria, known as "Sisi," is the Princess Diana of nineteenth-century Europe. Famously beautiful, as captured in a portrait with diamond stars in her hair, she is unfulfilled in her marriage to the older Emperor Franz Joseph. Sisi has spent years evading the stifling formality of royal life on her private train or yacht or, whenever she can, on the back of a horse. Captain Bay Middleton is dashing, young, and the finest horseman...

A fictionalized account of the final years of Thomas Hardy's life sees the premiere of the London theatre production of his acclaimed "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and his obsessive infatuation with the show's star revealed to his reclusive wife.

"Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still...

In an unnamed city, Edie works for the Elysian Society, a private service that allows grieving clients to reconnect with lost loved ones. She and her fellow workers, known as "bodies", wear the discarded belongings of the dead and swallow pills called lotuses to summon their spirits--numbing their own minds and losing themselves in the process. Edie has been with the company for five years, an unusual record. Her success is the result of careful detachment:...

A young mother and her infant child are ruthlessly gunned down while returning to their car in the garage of a shopping mall. The same night, the wife of A-list actor Marcus Dowling is woken by a cat burglar and in just seconds there is a nearly empty safe, a lifeless body, and another mystery that throws San Francisco into hysteria. Before the Women's Murder Club can piece together either case, one of the killers forces Detective Lindsay Boxer to...

"Mitchell Harris is captivated by Emma Sutton, but when his best friend also falls in love with her and asks for help writing her letters, he's torn between desire and loyalty. Longing for a family, Emma is elated when she receives a love note from a handsome engineer but must decide between the writer of the letters and her growing affection for Mitchell"--

A story set in a village experiencing the pains of industrialization when the city-bred son of the town's timber processing factory owner replaces workers with machines and then introduces a bus to replace the taxi-carts which ferry pilgrims from the railway station to the nearby temple. Shankar, one of the cart drivers, wagers a bet that in three months time, his cart can outrace the bus to the temple. If he wins, the displaced workers will keep...

"Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with the same man, an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, in western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother's musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he's also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future. When he runs away with Anuja, he overturns the...