Annotation:In the near future, a Handmaid named Offred describes life in what was once the United States, now the Republic of Gilead, a repressive and intolerant monotheocracy.

Annotation:Determined to live their lives to the fullest, three friends leave their stagnant homes in the suburbs and establish a new residence in a rural valley, but home improvement disasters and garden thieves cause unexpected hardships and force the ladies to reconsider the decisions they have made.

Annotation:Thanks to a chance phone call, Ria from Dublin and Marilyn from New England switch houses for the summer with extraordinary results when they are drawn into lifestyles vastly different than their own.

Annotation:Four friends lead dangerous lives, including Camille, who is pushed over the edge when her husband's indiscretions become public, Misa, who is involved with the heir to the Noble crime syndicate, until he shows his dark side, Dominique, who is caught up with a man in jail, and Latoya, a woman with skeletons in her closet.

Annotation:A landmark work of feminist fiction, first published in 1899, about a Louisiana woman who meets a young resort owner while on vacation and begins to fall in love with him despite her own marriage.

Annotation:Margaret struggles toward adulthood in a world torn apart by the Second World War and complicated by her strong-willed mother, Sophia, and grandmother, Charlie Kate, in a story about three generations of passionate, willful Southern women.

Annotation:With the coming of the Great Depression to the upper Midwest, two farmer's wives are pitted against one another, exposing the dark secrets they hide and triggering a series of events that will unravel their friendship--and their families.

Annotation:Young, bright Taylor Greer leaves her poverty-stricken life in Kentucky and heads west, picking up an abandoned Native American baby girl whom she names Turtle and finds a new home in Tucson with Mattie, an old woman who takes in Central American refugees.

Annotation:After falling in love with an American writer threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to combine the four notebooks she keeps into a single golden notebook, thus merging the recollections of her experience in Africa, her thoughts on politics and communism, a draft of a novel she is writing and her personal memoirs.

Annotation:Local author presents a tale about the complicated interactions between mothers and daughters who unwittingly inflict harm on one another in spite of their best intentions.

Annotation:Forced to leave Shanghai when their father sells them to California suitors, sisters May and Pearl struggle to adapt to life in 1930s Los Angeles while still bound to old customs, as they face discrimination and confront a life-altering secret.

Annotation:Plain and dutiful, Sophia Hess has lived most of her life without ever knowing genuine love. Her professor husband had married her for the convenience of having a typist for his scholarly papers. The discovery of a dark secret opens her eyes to the truth about her marriage and her husband. Eventually nephew Patrick and his wife, Rachel, take Sophia into their home, and she observes from a careful distance their earnest faith and the simple gifts of kindness they generously bestow upon her and others-this in spite of an unthinkable tragedy they've suffered.

Annotation:A former public defender, stay-at-home mom Juliet Applebaum is plunged back into a world of crime when her newborn son's babysitter, a lovely young Chasidic woman, mysteriously vanishes without a trace.

Annotation:Chronicles the romantic misadventures of Nan King, a onetime oyster girl from a provincial seaside town who follows a local music hall star to the gay and lesbian world of late Victorian London.

Annotation:Laurel Hand is forced to face her Southern past when she returns to Mississippi for her father's funeral. Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972.