It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to...  more

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance (and the subsequent cover-up) will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.

Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem. After a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead. When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won't give her an extension on her...  more

Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem. After a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead. When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won't give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father. For ten years, she's run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it. Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is. Romance is most certainly dead... but so is her new editor. And his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.

"A stunning achievement [that] . . . illuminates the tragedy of our treatment of those with mental and emotional problems."-Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients' belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in...  more

"A stunning achievement [that] . . . illuminates the tragedy of our treatment of those with mental and emotional problems."-Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients' belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. In this fully illustrated social history, they are skillfully examined and compared to the written record to create a moving-and devastating-group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.