A deceptively simple, imaginative story depicting the complex emotional reality of a girl whose father no longer lives at home. The girl conjures up an imaginary companion, a lion, who will come with her on the long walk home from school. He will help her to pick up her baby brother from daycare and shop at the store (which has cut off the familys credit), and he'll keep her company all along the way until she is safe at home. He will always come...

For nearly two decades, since the publication of her iconic first novel, The Good Mother, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters. In each of her novels, Miller has written with exquisite precision about the experience of grace in daily life–the sudden, epiphanic recognition of the extraordinary...

At the center of winter, in Motley, Minnesota, Arnold Schiller gives in to the oppressive season that reigns outside and also to his own inner demons he commits suicide, leaving a devastated family in his wake. Claire Schiller, wife and mother, takes shelter from the emotional storm with her husband's parents but must ultimately emerge from her grief and help her two young children to recover. Esau, her oldest, is haunted by the same darkness that...

When his father disappears along with several other men from their blue-collar Detroit neighborhood, sixteen-year-old Michael Smolij witnesses the effects of large-scale abandonment on the community's wives and mothers.

"Left on the train platform of some strange village, eight-year-old Saffron Faith Anders is certain her father will return shortly, just like he promised. She holds out hope as the hour grows late and the station sets to close. She clings to her suitcase like a life raft. When a peculiar old woman carrying a large umbrella approaches and inquires about her situation, Saffron doesn't immediately trust the imposing do-gooder, but eventually does agree...

Publisher Annotation: Gregory Maguire turns his trademark wit and wisdom to an animal adventure about growing up, moving on, and finding community. When Papa doesn't return from a nocturnal honey-gathering expedition, Cress holds out hope, but her mother assumes the worst. It’s a dangerous world for rabbits, after all. Mama moves what’s left of the Watercress family to the basement unit of the Broken Arms, a run-down apartment oak with a suspect...

"Living in Endora is like dancing to no music. Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp) should know. Aside from a secret affair with a housewife (Mary Steenburgen), Gilbert spends his days stocking shelves at a grocery store, caring for his mentally handicapped brother (Leonardo DiCaprio), and holding together a large family headed by Mama, a former beauty queen whose weight tops 500 pounds. But just when Gilbert thinks nothing will ever change, a pretty stranger...