Afia Satar is studious, modest, and devout. The young daughter of a landholding family in northern Pakistan, Afia has enrolled in an American college with the dream of returning to her country as a doctor. But when a photo surfaces online of Afia holding hands with an American boy, she is suddenly no longer safe—even from the family that cherishes her.

Brooke O'Connor--elegant, self-possessed, and kind--has a happy marriage and a deeply loved young daughter. So her adamant refusal to have a second child confounds her husband, Sean. When Brooke's high school boyfriend, Alex--now divorced and mourning the death of his young son--unexpectedly resurfaces, Sean begins to suspect an affair.

A memoir blending regional, national, and personal history to creative a fast-paced narrative with two timelines. One tells the dramatic, often funny story of the 1972 Veiled Prophet Ball, the largest cotillion in the country and the center of Midwestern WASP aristocracy in the heat of the civil rights era. The other takes place thirty years later, as Lucy returns to St. Louis from the East Coast to track down key figures from the moment when the Prophet was unveiled and the course of history changed forever.

The twelve stories in the award-winning collection Leaving the Neighborhood are variously concerned with departures -- physical, emotional, even philosophical. Yet few things in life are ever completely left behind.

Nine-year-old Toby Ames is a boy desperately in need of a heart transplant. His salvation comes in the form of Brooke Hunter, a young girl who died with her father in a motorcycle accident. Eight months later, Toby, his parents, Nick and Susannah, and Brooke's mother, Linsey, are left to face the demands of family, love, passion, and loss.

After Roe vs. Wade is overturned in 2011, Phoebe performs illegal "misconceptions" in her basement, until the suicide of a twelve-year old incest victim betrays her to the police, and she must decide between anonymity and moral righteousness.

Growing up along the Hudson River, Gwyn Stickley, nicknamed Stick, is eager to escape a hamlet full of secrets. Her flight and return, haunted by the image of the Challenger flight and explosion, become a journey through the uncontrollable, exhilarating worlds of love and pain.

Sleeping with the Boss opens up the feminist critical project by showing that author gender has no bearing on the creation of feminine-structured narrative. Moreover, by exposing a considerable “female consciousness” in the major fictional works of Robert Penn Warren, Ferriss’s perceptive examination departs dramatically from previous criticism of Warren.