A grieving widow takes a solitary road trip to her late husband's favorite getaway on pristine coastal Maine, where she remembers their many happy years of family life, reevaluates the time before they met, and considers her future.

Caroline Venable has everything her Southern heritage promised: money, prestige, a powerful husband-and a predictable routine of country-club luncheons, cocktail parties, and dinners hosting her husband's wealthy friends, clients, and associates in his successful land-developing conglomerate. To escape her stifling routine, Caro drinks a little too much. But her true solace is the Lowcountry island her beloved Granddaddy left her-an oasis of breathtaking...

It is summer, 1961, and Lila Lee Bayliss, motherless since birth and now 13, doesn't quite know what to make of Nora Findlay. Nora smokes, swears, wears short shorts, and when she listens, she looks at you as if she's never heard a human voice before. She also laughs a lot, something that's been missing for a long time in the Bayliss household, and she seems to have done just about everything fun there is to do in the world. Soon, even Lila's somber...

Anny Butler is a caretaker, a nurturer, first for her own brothers and sisters, and then as a director of an agency devoted to the welfare of children. What she has never had is a real family. That changes when she meets and marries Lewis Aiken, an exuberant surgeon fifteen years older than Anny. When they marry, she finds her family -- not a traditional one, but a group of Charleston childhood friends who are inseparable, who are one another's surrogate...

Elegant Kate, walking a tightrope over an abyss of lies...sensitive, sensible, self-contained Cecie...Ginger, the heiress, sexy, vibrant, richer than sin...and poor, hopeless, brilliant Fig they came together as sorority sisters on a Southern campus in the '60s. Four young women bound by rare, blinding, early friendship they spend two idyllic spring breaks at Nag's Head, North Carolina, the isolated strip of barrier islands where grand old weatherbeaten...

Over the years, Maude Chambliss gradually comes to cherish the people and spirit of Retreat, a colony which is the seasonal home of her husband's aristocratic family.

Headstrong, exuberant, and independent, Lucy Bondurant is a devastating beauty who will never become the demure Southern lady her mother and society demand. Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, Lucy's older cousin, is too shy and bookish to become the classically suave and gregarious Southern gentleman his family expects. Growing up together in a sprawling home on Atlanta's Peachtree Road, these two will be united by fierce love and hate, and by rebellion...

A best-selling author spins one of the most breathtaking stories of her career: a Gothic saga of lust, greed, and betrayal. When beautiful, dirt-poor Ruth Yancey rises to become the mistress of Sparta, Georgia's finest mansion, she reveals a heart of pure evil. For three generations, she rules the mansion through cruel manipulation and insinuation, breaking hearts and shattering souls, until one courageous woman decides to match her madness.

A spellbinding tale of unearthly terror that vibrates with tension, passion, and suspense. When a new house is built in a peaceful Southern neighborhood, terrifying things begin to happen. Slowly, with cold calculation, the house drives its inhabitants to scandal, madness, and death-until one woman summons the courage to stop its evil power. Filled with richly crafted characters and evocative suspense, this is a darkly haunting tale from one of America's...

Growing up, the only place tomboy Thayer Wentworth felt at home was at her summer camp - Camp Sherwood Forest in the North Carolina Mountains. It was there that she came alive and where she met Nick Abrams, her first love...and first heartbreak. Years later, Thayer marries Aengus, an Irish professor, and they move into her deceased grandmother's house in Atlanta, only miles from Camp Edgewood on Burnt Mountain where her father died years ago in a...