Three adult sisters return to their childhood home and discover the things they've been trying to distance themselves from may offer more than they had thought.

For ten years, Denny's father has battled cancer. The drawn-out loss has forged Denny into a dazed, antisocial young woman. On the clock, she works as a lab tech, readying fruit flies for experimentation. In her spare time, only her parents, an aggressively kind best friend, and her blowhard imaginary pal Gene--who she knows isn't real--ornament her stale days in the DC suburbs. Now her father's cancer is back for a third time, and he's rejecting...

New York, 1993. Alice Culvert is a caring wife, a doting new mother, a loyal friend, and a soulful artist, a fashion designer who wears a baby carrier and haute couture with equal aplomb. In their loft in Manhattan's gritty Meatpacking District, Alice and her husband, Oliver, are raising their infant daughter, Doe, delighting in the wonders of early parenthood. Their life together feels so vital and full of promise, which makes Alice's sudden cancer...

"Childhood can be rough. But for Kenzie growing up in the Lowe home means opening the bottom drawer of her father's dresser to choose which of the three belts coiled, waiting like snakes, she wants to get whipped with; trips to Beehive Liquors for her father's vodka; and dreaming of the day she can escape apartment A5. She goes to school, she holds odd jobs, and develops her own craving for the bottle. Twenty years have passed and it's now the nineties...

Edwardo Jackson continues the tale of Nick-the-bachelor. But this time, Nick is having a change of heart. Maybe marriage is right for him after all. Now he just has to find the perfect woman-which proves to be more trouble than he thought.

"Braver Than You Think is the life-affirming story of how Downs, newly married and established in her career as a journalist, quits her job, sells her belongings, and embarks on the solo trip of a lifetime: Her mother's. Over the course of one year backpacking through seventeen countries - visiting all the places her mother, struck with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, cannot visit herself - Maggie faces some of the world's most exotic locales while...

Four siblings, now adults, return home to North Carolina, to their terminally ill mother's house for what they think are her final few days. When she hangs on, they find themselves stuck under the same roof for two difficult weeks. But as the children come to terms with their grief, they discover laughter in the midst of sorrow, love in the face of anger, and an opportunity to gain new perspectives on their own lives.

C.1 ST. AID B & T. 01-18-2008. $13.95.