"Amy Connell and Lan Honey are having the best childhood, growing up on a West Country farm--with three families, a couple of lodgers, goats, dogs, and an orphaned calf called Gabriella Christmas. The parents are best friends, too. Originally from the city, they're learning about farming: growing their own vegetables, milking the goats, slaughtering chickens, and scything the hay-- "Mind your eyes! Careful, that's sharp! Don't break your neck!" The...

"Clayton Stumper might be in his twenties, but he dresses like your grandpa and fusses like your aunt. Abandoned at birth on the steps of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, he was raised by a group of eccentric enigmatologists and now finds himself among the last survivors of a fading institution. When the esteemed crossword compiler and main maternal presence in Clayton's life, Pippa Allsbrook, passes away, she bestows her final puzzle on him: a promise...

"In the fall of 1967, a schlemiel named Don Bessemer from Short Pump, Virginia, got me pregnant. Well, okay, I got myself pregnant with his assistance. I fell for this superficial clod one rainy October afternoon when we were the only two patrons in a hole-in-the-wall called Café Ludovico off Astor Place..." So begins the journey into adulthood of 19-year-old Erica "Pooh" (as in Winnie the) Bollinger from Oyster Bay, Long Island. She's a sophomore...

The story of an extraordinary experiment in communal living, one involving young but already iconic writers--and the country's best-known burlesque performer--in a house in Brooklyn during 1940 and 1941. It was a fevered yearlong party fueled by the appetites of youth and by the shared sense of urgency to take action as artists in the months before America entered the war. In spite of the sheer intensity, the house was for its residents a creative...

"Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. But Ursa's powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her...

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island?s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial...

"The shocking story of the Sullivan Institute, a psychoanalytic organization of artists and intellectuals that devolved into a dangerous cult on Manhattan's Upper West Side"--

New Englander Sarah Worth goes west to join a Hindu commune in Arizona. There she mingles with the other sannyasins (pilgrims) in the difficult attempt to subdue ego and achieve salvation and release from illusion.

On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. He and his wife are trying to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live and work at their family home. Lily becomes infatuated with this wild, makeshift family and longs to truly be part of it. As the years pass, Lily observes the way the lives of these artists come to reflect...