Val and Milly fell in love with France at the same time they fell in love with each other and became immediate best friends. Then they bonded as the only Black students on a study-abroad trip. Now they are in their 30s, each married and with a baby girl on the way. When Milly suggests Val move to New York so they can raise their daughters together, it’s a resounding yes. Despite their excitement, the pair secretly wonders if their friendship has always worked best as a trio. On that first trip to France, these two motherless daughters were taken under the wing of an older woman named Helene. She showered them with money, love and attention and showed them the possibilities of an independent and abundant future. But now, without Helene and her guidance, who are Milly and Val?

New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist. Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom. But five years later, Odette's life is nothing like what she'd planned. She's a widowed mother, and she and Delphine have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.

Violet “West” Shelley has unwillingly spent her life in the spotlight as the only daughter of a legendary poet and feminist icon who died tragically young. Now, as the self-described “lowbrow” crime journalist approaches 50 --- burned out, creatively blocked, and far older than her mother ever was --- she retreats to her hometown in the Colorado mountains hometown to finish a long-overdue book about the “Crying Killer,” a notorious serial killer who sobs for his mother after committing his crimes. But what begins as a bid for solitude quickly spirals into something far more sinister. A stalker emerges, insisting that West is their long-lost mother, though she has never had children. As the threats escalate, West is drawn into a chilling psychological web where the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to collapse.

When 26-year-old Daisy wakes up next to James Stanley, she can’t believe what she’s done. But sleeping with him is a casualty of a Much Larger Problem --- there is not a decent, single man to be found in London. Fed up with the dating scene, Daisy and her best friend, Maya, decide to stop waiting and take matters into their own hands with “The Project.” Their goal? To build the perfect, eligible match out of some of the most lackluster, raw material. And who better to start with than their embarrassingly uncivilized (yet frustratingly attractive) friend, James? Embarking on a series of social and cultural lessons --- from art exhibitions to feminist book clubs, designer clothing stores to house parties --- Daisy and Maya chaperone James on a journey of discovery. But which of them will change more?

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong? While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo, her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins.

The Mortons are a modern-day, old-money dynasty with impeccable taste --- from their exquisitely crafted cocktails to their expertly tailored vintage garments. They are also stone-cold killers. For the Mortons, homicide is heritage. They, along with the other crime families, send their progeny to Helshire College, where legacy students learn to exercise control over their wealthy peers. Jessica Morton has always excelled at Helshire, secure in the knowledge that she is the prodigy of her generation. Now, having committed her first kill, it should be Jessica’s moment, her honor. But that kill will cut more ways than one, unknotting a series of revelations spanning the Mortons’ country estate, the New York City art world, and Helshire itself.

Will Miles is trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. But when she stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer 40 years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she has found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she's never known? Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, and their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives her sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined. But when a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.

Malti Patel is absolutely fine. Concussed and bruised, maybe, but fine. Certainly fine enough not to need her daughter's soon-to-be ex-husband, Nathan Whitlock, playing nurse in her home while she recuperates. But that's exactly the quandary in which she finds herself. Her doctor insists on in-home supervision for seven days. With her daughter, Kavya, abroad at grad school in India, Nathan proves too much of a do-gooder to let Malti rehabilitate alone. Malti and Nathan want nothing to do with one another. But over the course of the week, they learn that they are the two people who know Kavya best --- and the ones who have hurt her so deeply that she has left them both.

Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick always has been terrified of the ocean. Drifting alone in the sea after falling (or jumping? He can’t remember as the all-inclusive drinks on the cruise he was taking with his extended family were, well, inclusive), Kick must survive. As the waves crash over him, so too do the thoughts and memories of just how he got there. A Thanksgiving cruise with an obnoxious brother-in-law he has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming at. A father who gives the Great Santini a run for his money. And a mother who already left the family boat, so to speak, a long time ago. His family may be complicated, and the pains of life may seem unbearable --- infuriating enough to leap from the deck --- but maybe the will to survive is stronger.

Billie has built the perfect life. Her medical practice in New York City is thriving, and she’s finally found the right partner in Dean after years spent trying to move on from her high-school sweetheart, Mick. Their young love had been intense and true, but distance and ambition pulled them apart when she left Wisconsin for medical school. Then one morning, just after she’s accepted Dean’s romantic marriage proposal, Billie’s phone rings. It’s Mick --- calling for the first time in nearly a decade. His news is urgent. In a moment, everything changes. As Billie boards a plane back to Wisconsin, her past comes rushing in --- her hometown friendships, the love she and Mick shared, and the choices that shaped them all. What awaits her is a reckoning with what she’s lost, what she’s built, and what she still wants.