Chrysanthemum loves her name, until she starts going to school and the other children make fun of it.

20-year-old Sophie is preparing to marry at her mother's hotel on a Greek island. She has a carefree life, a loving fiancee, and great friends. She is only missing one thing: a father. By reading her mother's diary she discovers that she has three possible fathers. Sophie secretly invites all three men to the wedding in a desperate bid to discover which of them is her father. But not all goes according to plan. Now, old loves are re-kindled, new loves...

Julie Powell is a frustrated insurance worker who wants to be a writer. Trying to find a challenge in her life, she decides to cook her way through Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' in one year, and to blog about it. As Julie begins to find her groove as a cook, and her voice as a writer, the project takes on a life of its own. The project provides the struggling young woman with her life's purpose, to her very pleasant surprise....

The story centers on Jonas, young man who lives in a supposedly ideal world of conformity and contentment. Yet as he begins to spend time with the elder, who is the sole keeper of all the community's memories, Jonas quickly begins to discover the dark and deadly truths of his community's secret past. At extreme odds, Jonas knows that he must escape their world to protect them all; a challenge that no one has ever succeeded at before.

When his army unit is ambushed during the first Gulf War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw saves his fellow soldiers just as his commanding officer, Major Ben Marco, is knocked unconscious. Using the incident for political gain, Shaw eventually becomes a vice-presidential nominee, but Marco is haunted by dreams of what really happened in Iraq. As Marco investigates, the story begins to unravel. He begins to figure that the entire unit was kidnapped and brainwashed...