"Sally Gunnar has withdrawn from the world. She spends her days alone at home, reading drugstore mysteries, polishing the doorknobs, waxing the floors. Her only companions are a vase of godfish, a garden toad, and the door-to-door salesman who sells her cleaning suplies once a month. She broods over her deepest regrets: her blighted romances with self-important men, her lifelong struggle to feel at home in her body, and her wayward early twenties,...

On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien...

Meg Finn is in trouble. She's dead, but not at peace--she's in limbo, her good deeds perfectly balanced against her bad deeds; Heaven or Hell wait, a tip of the scale away. So she's back on Earth trying to tip the scale to the good by helping her last victim, and her former "partner" is also back, trying to force her to tip the scale to the bad.

In the summer of 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanished from her family's vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. The loss devastated the family. Sixty-four years later, Emily's sister Lucy writes the story of that harrowing summer in a notebook that she bequeaths, along with the lake house and a hefty investment portfolio, to her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers a chance to give her own daughters a stable home she never...

"Discover the steps to earning your path to fulfillment and living without regrets--from the world-renowned executive coach and New York Times bestselling author of Triggers and What Got You Here Won't Get You There. Our lives exist on a continuum between two poles: fulfillment and regret. We invest enormous resources of time and energy into staying healthy, being recognized for our achievements, nurturing our relationships, and making money. When...

The final novel from the author of the Marseilles trilogy. Rico has been banished to society's margins; he has neither a roof over his head nor a steady income on which to depend. When a friend and fellow vagabond dies of exposure after a night spent in the Paris metro, Rico decides to flee the northern cold for his beloved south, for Marseilles and the warmth of the Mediterranean. Diverted and hindered along the way, he suffers the vagaries of human...

"From Daniel H. Pink, the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of When and Drive, a new book about the transforming power of that crucial and misunderstood emotion, regret. "Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, it is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human," Daniel H. Pink writes in his provocative and eye-opening new book. "Done right, it needn't bring us down; it can lift us up." Drawing from new research in social psychology, neuroscience,...

Frank has been in a car accident. The doctor tells him he lost his spleen, but Frank believes he has lost more. He is missing memories - of those around him, of the history they share and of how he came to be in the crash. All he remembers is that he is a lawyer who specializes in fine print*. In the wake of the accident Frank begins to piece together his former life - and his former self. But the picture that emerges, of his marriage, his family...

"In the title story, "Funny Once," a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In "The Village," a woman visits her father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own past indiscretions. In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes missing, a mother worries increasingly about her teenage son's relationship with a bad-news...

"It's a truth universally acknowledged that terrible apologies are the worst. We've all been on the receiving end, and oh, how they make us seethe. Horrible public apologies-excuse-laden, victim blame-y, weaselly statements-often go viral instantaneously, whether they're from a celebrity, a politician, or a blogger. We all recognize bad apologies when we hear them. So why is it so hard to apologize well? How can we do better? How could they do better?...