"Brilliant, dark stories of women's lives by "a very major talent" (Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times). In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by deprivation--material, emotional, sexual--but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they've been dealt. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate. An expectant...

Trying to maintain her inner light in an increasingly dark world, young Hong Kong-based scientist Lily Barnes, as the human race dwindles due to a "depression plague," comes across something that could lead to happiness and journeys through time and space to find out A few years from now, in a world similar to ours, there exists a sort of "depression plague" that people refer to simply as "The Grey." No one can predict whom it will afflict, or how,...

When his friends and family see the bad in a situation, Nate sees a bright side to everything.

In the midst of the rain, rainbows can be hard to see. But with courage and the help of good friends, there is always a way out of the darkness.

"In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. What Junie doesn't know is that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country. In order for Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three...

'Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul' - Emily Dickinson. This is a story about hope, kindness and redemption set in a grey dystopian world. When a great feather drifts from the leaden sky, two children recognise its extraordinariness and take it to the village for its protection. The villagers, however, want to encase it, upon which the feather loses its radiance. The children take it home and care for it through the night. In...

"Co-quí, co-quí! The coquí frogs sing to Elena from her family's beloved mango tree--their calls so familiar that they might as well be singing, "You are home, you are safe." But home is suddenly not safe when a hurricane threatens to destroy everything that Elena knows."--

Kek, an African refugee, is confronted by many strange things at the Minneapolis home of his aunt and cousin, as well as in his fifth grade classroom, and longs for his missing mother, but finds comfort in the company of a cow and her owner.

A little fish lost in the ocean must find a spark of light to show it the way home.