Cassie Claiborne's world is riddled with problems beyond her control: her hard-living father has another wife; her long-suffering mother is incapable of moving on; her sister Belle is a tempest of fragility and brilliance; her closest friends are adolescent harbingers of their own doomed futures. Frustrated by her inability to care deeply enough for so many troubled souls, Cassie finds in the local pool hall an oasis of green felt where she can mater...

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

...

"A fifteen-year-old girl longs for the father she never knew"--Provided by the publisher.

Julius Harris struggles to bring his family back together, but his three sons, all busy with their own concerns and problems, continue to feel the repercussions of their father's abandonment and their fatherless childhoods.