"Max and Pip are the strongest couple you know. They're best friends, lovers--unshakable. But then their son gets sick and the doctors put the question of his survival into their hands. For the first time, Max and Pip can't agree. They each want a different future for their son." --

Well-versed in the mating habits of captive animals, Sarah, who studies animal behavior at the zoo, longs to have a baby, while her loyal friends, each dealing with their own parenting issues, discover that the families they forge through shared experience are as important as those inherited through birth.

"Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her stalled-out dissertation on confessional poetry when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a sailboat. With their two kids - Sybil, age seven, and George, age two - Juliet and Michael set off for Panama, where their forty-four foot sailboat awaits them. The initial result is transformative; the marriage is given a gust of energy, Juliet emerges from her depression,...

"After the tragic death of Butch Browning's wife, four families begin to realize how precious their time together is. Each is at a different stage in life: Butch is facing single parenthood. The O'Reillys are expecting their first child. The Andersons are approaching an empty nest, and the Buckleys are so focused on providing their children with everything that they've forgotten what they truly need. With just eighteen summers before their children...

"Two familes from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier,...

"What should have been a fun-filled, carefree day takes a tragic turn for the worse for one mother when her best friend's child goes missing in this suspenseful, compulsively readable, and darkly twisted psychological thriller. It all started at the school fair. Charlotte was supposed to be looking after the children, and she swears she was. She only took her eyes off of them for one second. But when her three kids are all safe and sound at the school...

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti's intimate and urgent novel considers whether...

"Brady Nash is handsome and anti-marriage. And with IVF completely out of her financial reach, Reyna Bishop is running out of time to have the child she so very much wants. Theirs is a practical baby-making deal: no emotion, no expectation, no ever-after. They'll even "date" through Christmas to silence their hometown gossips. It's foolproof...till the time she spends with Brady and his warm, loving family leaves Reyna wanting more than a baby..."...

"Rose Woodrowe is getting married to Tyler Masson - a wonderful, sensitive man who is head-over-heels in love with her. The only problem? This isn't the first time for either of them, and their five grown-up children have strong opinions on the matter ... Who to listen to? Who to please? Rose and Tyler are determined to get it right this time, but in trying to make everyone happy, can they ever be happy themselves?" --