"Rosario Delgado, a Filipina novelist in New York City, learns of her mother's death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on an investigation into her family's history and her mother's supposed inheritance, a place called La Tercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogs generations of family bequests and detritus: maps of uncertain purpose, rusted chicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs...

Years after poor health forces celebrated author Flannery O'Connor to return to her family home in Milledgeville, Georgia, Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks when her mother decides she must go to the wedding of a family friend.

"In this latest novel from the award-winning author of The Polyglot Lovers, a writer searching for inspiration in Spain goes on a darkly comic, delightfully absurd journey through an underground society. Awarded a three-month stipend to travel and work, a Swedish writer flies to Madrid, where in a bar she meets a man with an extraordinary story to tell. In exchange for somewhere to sleep and to hide out for a few days, he is willing to tell her the...

"When she is hired to write lyrics for a contestant in the talent competition for the Miss Teen Queen America pageant, freelance writer Jaine Austen is plunged into a glittering nightmare of vicious stage moms, exacting judges and trash-talking teens after a catfight turns deadly"--

"Abandoned by her mother at age seven, Alexandra Winslow took solace in the mystery stories she read with her devoted father--and soon she was writing them herself, slowly graduating to dark, violent, complex crime stories that reflected skill and imagination far beyond her years. After her father's early death, at fourteen Alex is taken in by the nuns of a local convent, where she finds twenty-six mothers to take the place of the one she lost, and...

Young Emily and Charlotte Bront? solve a mystery.