This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

John and Jane Smith are a married couple who are beginning to get bored with their quiet domestic life. What they don't know, however, is that they are both assassins, secretly traveling around the world and killing for hire. But their separate lives are about to collide when the discover they are each other's next target.

A novel of the future explores a world that has been devastated gy ecological and scientific disasters.

Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, Frances and Bobbi catch the eye of Melissa, a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into Melissa's world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated...

A psychological tale recounts the experiences of Andrew, who confesses to an unknown recipient the memory- and truth-challenging events, loves, and tragedies that have led him to a mysterious act. Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back...

"When a group of friends in Mason, Missouri decide to start a monthly supper club, they get more than they bargained for. Instead of sharing recipes, they begin sharing secrets. When Iris Winters and Maddy Harris are invited to the club, they find that it's just what each of them needs. Iris hasn't yet told anyone about the unlikely man who has captured her attention, and Maddy has come back home to escape a problem too big for her to confront." --...

"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...

A poor girl overcomes temptation and succeeds in life. It happens when she befriends a rich girl whose father offers to pay her college tuition. It is not easy, the rich one, now turned playgirl, tempting her away from studies with boys.

"Florida: a place of storms, snakes, and sinkholes, and so much more. Lauren Groff explores a different side of her adopted home state in this collection of stories. The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries. Yet Florida-- its landscapes, climate, history, and state of mind-- becomes the gravitational center as Groff writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time." --

"Kate, Aubrey, and Jenny. They first met as college roommates and soon became inseparable, even though they are as different as three women can be. Twenty years later, one of them is standing at the edge of a bridge, and someone else is urging them to jump. How did things come to this? As the novel cuts back and forth between their college years and their adult years, you see the exact reasons why these women love and hate each other--but can feelings...