Damaris escapes her father's drunken abuse, but she can't seem to escape her profound loneliness. Does the Bible hold the answer to both that and the question of why she is A Woman Named Damaris?

Abandoned by the alcoholic father who idealized the natural world without imparting any survival skills to his children, three siblings in 1970s New York embark on difficult adult lives before their father attempts a reconciliation.

"The story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a...

Professor David Ullman is a leading authority on demonic literature, specializing in Milton's Paradise Lost. David sees what he teaches as a branch of the imagination and nothing more. So when the mysterious Thin Woman invites him to Venice to witness a "phenomenon," he turns her down. She leaves behind plane tickets and an address, advising David that her employer is not often disappointed. And what happens in Venice will change everything.

"Jillian Slater hadn't seen her father or his mother in almost 20 years until, on the news that her father had finally drunk himself to death, Adella Atwater, the manager of her grandmother's apartment house, calls and says Jillian's expenses would be paid if she'd fly in to New Orleans for the burial. What Adella didn't tell her was that the apartment house bears the dead weight of a long and painful history. As an investigation into her father's...

Growing up in their family's ancestral home in Wales, Jonathan Anthony and his little sister, Theo, are inseparable, inventing magical worlds and buttressing each other against the loneliness of life with their alcoholic mother, Alicia. When a family tragedy brings their glamorous grandmother, Eve, home from America, Jonathan and Theo are initially elated by the attention she lavishes on them. But soon it becomes clear that there is more to the Anthony...

"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...

"Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh 'Shuggie' Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front...