At the renowned writing school in Bonneville, every student is simultaneously terrified of and attracted to the charismatic and mysterious poet and professor Miranda Sturgis, whose high standards for art are both intimidating and inspiring. As two students, Roman and Bernard, strive to win her admiration, the lines between mentorship, friendship, and love are blurred.

Roman's star rises early, and his first book wins a prestigious prize. Meanwhile, Bernard labors for years over a single poem. Secrets of the past begin to surface, friendships are broken, and Miranda continues to cast a shadow over their lives. What is the hidden burden of early promise? What are the personal costs of a life devoted to the pursuit of art? All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is a brilliant evocation of the demands of ambition and vocation, personal loyalty and poetic truth.

Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet.

In a time of hauntings and new revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may only be determined by those who love them most.

In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let the beloved local preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. No longer can he remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love.

With equal parts affection and satire, Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about the loyalties, rivalries, and secrets of a very particular family. Yet again, she plumbs the human heart brilliantly, dramatically, and movingly.

Claire is at the start of her medical career when she falls in love with Addison Boehning, a biochemist with blazing genius and big dreams. A complicated pregnancy deflects Claire's professional path, and she is forced to drop out of her residency. Soon thereafter Addison invents a simple blood test for ovarian cancer, and his biotech start-up lands a fortune. Overnight the Boehnings are catapulted into a financial and social tier they had never anticipated or sought.

Then Addison gambles everything on a cutting-edge cancer drug, and when the studies go awry, their comfortable life is swept away. Claire and her daughter, Jory, move to a dilapidated ranch house in rural Hallum, where Claire has to find a job until Addison can salvage his discredited lab. Her only offer for employment comes from a struggling public health clinic, but Claire gets more than a second chance at medicine as a new mystery unfolds that threatens to destroy her family and forces her to question what it truly means to heal.

Rioux explores the landscape of the written word in search of lost paradises. It is a collection of interconnected tales in which people from vastly different walks of life are united in their search—spanning cultures, histories, and geographies—for what they have lost and what they never had: a soulmate, a soul, childhood, and a reason to go on living.

Hélène Rioux has published poetry, news articles, short stories, translations, and seven novels. She received the Prix France-Québec and the Prix Ringuet de l'Académie des Lettres du Québec in 2008 for Mercredi soir au Bout du monde, the Grand Prix littérare du Journal de Montréal, and the Prix de la Société des écrivains canadiens for Chambre avec Baignoire in 1992. She has been a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award five times.

Solomon's Oak is the story of three people who have suffered losses that changed their lives forever. To make ends meet, Glory Solomon, a young widow, is using the chapel her husband built on their central California farm, under a 200-year-old white oak tree, as a place to hold unusual weddings. Fourteen-year-old Juniper McGuire is the surviving member of a family decimated by a local kidnapping. Juniper arrives on Glory's doorstep, pierced, tattooed, angry and homeless. Joseph Vigil is a former Albuquerque police officer and crime lab photographer who was shot during an assignment. Now disabled and in constant pain, he came to California to photograph the giant trees of the state.

Jo-Ann Mapson's deeply felt, wise and warm portrayal of broken souls finding their way back to humanity shows how these three people—along with a host of dogs, horses and goats—enter and transform each other's lives.

For reasons multiple and mysterious, Sheila finds herself in a quandary of self-doubt, questioning how a person should be in the world. Inspired by her friend Margaux—a painter—and her seemingly untortured ability to live and create, Sheila casts Margaux as material, embarking on a series of recordings in which nothing is too personal, too ugly, or too banal to be turned into art. Along the way, Sheila confronts a cast of painters who are equally blocked in an age in which "the blow job is the ultimate artform." She begins questioning her desire to be Important, her quest to be both a leader and a pupil, and her unwillingness to sacrifice herself.

Searching, uncompromising and yet mordantly funny, How Should a Person Be? is a brilliant portrait of art-making and friendship from the psychic underground of Canada's most fiercely original writer.

Billie Girl, written with dark humor, is the story of a misguided woman. Born in 1900, she's raised by two women who are, unknown to all, brothers. The brother-mothers employ murder and euthanasia to protect Billie Girl, and pow! Her life becomes a series of events controlled by the strangers she encounters: the handyman, Dove, her guardian; her first husband, Judge, a gentlemanly, moneyed bigamist who is not a judge; the almost-gay man who teaches her the art of self-induced orgasm; her long-lost daughter Forda (yes, named after a car); a preacher's wife whose religious loneliness of heart shoves her into the arms of another woman; and Billie Girl's second husband, whose platonic love almost makes her happy. She's dying in a nursing home, secretly practicing euthanasia, before her beliefs about love and compassion are put to the test.

Two years after the death of her husband, it is time for Hattie Kong—the spirited offspring of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China—to start over. She moves to the town of Riverlake, where she is soon joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run from their inner-city troubles, as well as—quite unexpectedly—by a just-retired neuroscientist ex-lover named Carter Hatch. All of them are, like Hattie, looking for a new start in a town that might once have represented the rock-solid base of American life but that is itself challenged, in 2001, by cell-phone towers and chain stores, struggling family farms and fundamentalist Christians.

What Hattie makes of this situation is at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, America, what neighbors are, what love is, and, in the largest sense, what "worlds" we make of the world.