Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loveslines from...

A heartwarming novel about secrets of youth rediscovered, hometown memories, and the magical moments in ordinary lives, from the beloved author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe "A gift, a blessing and a triumph . . . celebrates the bonds of family and friends-and the possibilities of recovery and renewal."-The Free Lance-Star Bud Threadgoode grew up in the bustling little railroad town of Whistle Stop with his mother, Ruth, church-going...

When crotchety octogenarian Paul Jacobson discovers a body wedged in a retirement home trash chute, he must become an amateur sleuth to clear himself as a murder suspect while struggling with the problems of his short term memory loss and being stuck living with "a bunch of old people." As Paul's snooping gets him in trouble with the local police and the retirement home administration, he meets eccentric residents, develops a new friendship, experiences...

"After he's forced to sell the family farm he's labored on his whole life, 63-year-old Gerrit Laninga doesn't know what to do with himself. He sacrificed everything for the land--his time, his health, his family--with nothing to show for it but bitterness, regret, and two grown children who want nothing to do with him. Fifteen-year-old Rae Walters has growing doubts and fears about The Plan--the detailed blueprint for high school that will help her...

Allergic to group activities of any kind, all her life Serenata has run, swum, and cycled on her lonesome. But now that she's hit 60, all that physical activity has destroyed her knees. As she contemplates surgery with dread, her previously sedentary husband Remington, recently and ignominiously redundant, chooses this precise moment to discover exercise. Which should be good for his health, right? Yet as he joins the cult of fitness that seems increasingly...

"Bob Comet is a retired librarian, isolated but not lonely, living out his quiet days in a mint-colored house in Oregon, surrounded by his books and small comforts. One morning, out on his daily walk, he performs an act of kindness that brings him into contact with a nearby senior center, where he soon begins volunteering. Here, as a community of peers and friends gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from...

"On the third day of the Kendleton Country Fair, thirteen-year-old Charlotte Kirkham goes missing. Retired Detective Superintendent Henry Christie is there as a volunteer steward, but Charlotte's sudden disappearance isn't the only thing troubling him. The man with the burger van looks familiar...for all the wrong reasons. Leonard Lennox was jailed for twelve years for abducting a young girl. Henry rescued her, unharmed, and helped put Leonard behind...