"A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley"-- Bertha Truitt has always been an enigma to people in Salford, Massachusetts. She was discovered unconscious in a cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century-- nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her...

"Framed. Bullied. Disliked. But I know I can still be the best. Sometimes, 12-year-old Donte wishes he were invisible. As one of the few black boys at Middlefield Prep, most of the students don't look like him. They don't like him either. Dubbing him "Black Brother," Donte's teachers and classmates make it clear they wish he were more like his lighter-skinned brother, Trey. When he's bullied and framed by the captain of the fencing team, "King" Alan,...

The Freeman family--Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie--have been invited to the Toneybee Institute in rural Massachusetts to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected for the experiment because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member...

The beautiful Francesca Woodbine is the granddaughter of a prostitute and fortune-teller, and herself gifted with second sight. She is haunted with guilt and does not realize her own life is in danger.

After the suspcious death of his father, Adam Blaine attempts to help his family heal as the court inquest into Benjamin Blaine's death casts suspicion on those closest to him. "Two months after the suspicious and much-publicized death of his father on the island of Martha's Vineyard, it is taking all of Adam Blaine's will to suture the deep wounds the tragedy has inflicted upon his family and himself. As the court inquest into Benjamin Blaine's...