The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve When Kathryn's husband dies in an airplane crash, she is devastated.  Then she begins asking questions about the accident which leads to her to discover things about her husband she never knew...

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink Michael Berg is only 15 when he begins an affair with Hanna, a woman twice his age.  She enthralls him with her passion, but puzzles him with her odd silences.  Then she inexplicably disappears.  When he next sees her, he is a young law student and Hanna is on trial for a hideous crime.  But as he watches her refuse to defend herself, Michael gradually realizes that his former lover may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

Jewel by Bret Lott Jewel and her husband, Leston, are truly blessed; they have five fine children. When Brenda Kay is born in 1943, Jewel gives thanks for a healthy baby, last-born and most welcome. Jewel is the story of how quickly a life can change; how, like lightning, an unforeseen event can set us on a course without reason or compass.

Where The Heart Is by Billie                                             Letts Pregnant, overweight, and convinced about her inherent bad luck, Novalee Nation hopes for a new life in a new state with her boyfriend.  When he dumps her at a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma, she must depend on the kindness of strangers in order to make it.

Midwives by Chris Bohjalian On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes terribly wrong. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman's terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really dead when the midwife operated.

I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb A few years after his newborn daughter's death, 34-year-old Dominick Birdsey has seen both his marriage and his teaching career go south. And his girlfriend, a twice-divorced 23-year-old with a shoplifting habit, is resentful of the promise Dominick made to his mother before she died -- that he would always look out for his identical twin brother, Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic. As the novel opens, Dominick is fighting off a frenzy of reporters clamoring for Thomas, who hacked off his right hand to protest the Gulf War. Soon enough Thomas is committed to a maximum-security facility. Through Dominick's own commitment to his brother he can face and forgive his own failures.

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat Danticat's heroine is Sophie Caco, who has spent a happy childhood in rural Haiti with her grandmother and her beloved aunt Atie, who raised her as her own child. Sophie's mother, Martine, lives in New York City and supports the family with the money she sends home. When Sophie is twelve years old, Martine sends for her, and Sophie must leave the only home and family she knows and begin a new life in a strange country with a mother she hardly remembers. As Sophie overcomes her initial fears and becomes closer to her mother, she learns that Martine has for many years been tormented by memories of the anonymous man--Sophie's father--who violently raped her when she was a teenager.  A wonderful novel about a mother and daughter; beautifully written.

Here On Earth by Alice Hoffman When March Murray travels East with her teenage daughter to attend the funeral of the beloved housekeeper who looked after her when she was growing up, March's past comes rushing up to meet her. The present is quickly dominated by the lurking presence of her former lover, Hollis, who has patiently awaited her long overdue return. The tale is populated by those for whom love brings more sorrow than happiness: a woman afraid to commit to a relationship, a husband in love with someone other than his wife, two young people who fall for each other only to find they are close relatives, and the self-destructing love of Hollis and March.

Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen "The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old," begins Fran Benedetto, the broken heroine of Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue. With one sweeping sentence, the door to an abused and tortured world is swung wide open and the psyche of a crushed and tattered self-image exposed. "Frannie, Frannie, Fran"--as Bobby Benedetto liked to call her before smashing her into kitchen appliances--was a young, energetic nursing student when she met her husband-to-be at a local Brooklyn bar. She was instantly captivated by his dark, brooding looks and magnetic personality, but her fascination soon solidified into a marital prison sentence of incessant abuse and the destruction of her own identity. After an especially horrific beating and rape, Fran realizes that the next attack could be the last. Fearing her son would be left alone with Bobby, she escapes one morning with her child. Fran's salvation comes in the form of Patty Bancroft and Co., a relocation agency for abused women that touts better service than the witness protection program. Armed only with a phone number, a few hundred dollars, and the help of several anonymous volunteers, Fran begins a new life. The agency relocates her to Florida, where she becomes Beth Crenshaw, a recently divorced home-care assistant from Delaware. Fran and her son adapt, meeting challenges with unexpected resilience and resolve until their past returns to haunt them.

Paradise by Toni Morrison A new minister has come to town, bringing with him a whiff of the politics that engulfed that era--civil rights, student uprisings, rioting in the streets--activities which speak to the restlessness of the town's youth. Meanwhile, 17 miles away at the former girls' school nicknamed "the Convent," a small group of unconventional women have moved in. Their stories, told in individual chapters bearing their names, are also stories of exile, exodus, and eventual homecoming. For the men of Ruby, however, these women represent everything that is dangerous about the outside world, and as the sanctity of Ruby's traditions begin to crumble, nine men go on a deadly hunt.

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage After a decade of luxe living in Atlanta, Ada Johnson has returned to tiny Idlewild, Michigan--her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits on one dark truth: Ada has tested positive for HIV. But rather than a sorrowful end, her homecoming is a new beginning. Because, in the ten-plus years since she left, all the problems of the big city have invaded the sleepy community of her childhood. Because dear friends and family sorely need her help in the face of impending trouble and tragedy, and Ada cannot turn her back on them. And because, most importantly, Ada Johnson is inexplicably and undeniably falling in love.

Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons After the death of her mother, eleven-year-old Ellen Foster discovers that life with her father has become too dangerous and tries to find a new home.

A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.