No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec, where two dozen cloistered monks live in peace and prayer. They grow vegetables, they tend chickens, they make chocolate. And they sing. Ironically, for a community that has taken a vow of silence, the monks have become world famous for their glorious voices, raised in ancient chants whose effect on both singer and listener is...

Set in South Carolina in 1964, [this book] tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters...

Philadelphia defense attorney Ellie Hathaway, unsatisfied with the course of her career and personal life, leaves her job for an open-ended stay at her great-aunt's home in Paradise, Pennsylvania, arriving just in time to become embroiled in the case of a young, unmarried Amish woman accused of killing her newborn baby.

Hewitt Pearce, a blacksmith living in his family's Vermont home, finds his quiet life disturbed by a troubled young woman and the knowledge that the woman he has always loved has recently been widowed.

Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they--and Grace--know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight...

When her mother is abducted by aliens on Christmas Eve (or "Smekday" Eve since the Boov invasion), 11 year-old Tip hops in the family car and heads south to find her and meets an alien Boov mechanic who agrees to help her and save the planet from disaster.

Magically transported to southwest China to find the final object needed to break the spell on the wizard Merlin's beloved penguin, Jack and Annie take a side trip to the world's largest giant panda reserve.

While a cellist plays at the site of a mortar attack to commemorate the deaths of twenty-two friends and neighbors, two other men set out in search of bread and water to keep themselves alive, and a woman sniper secretly protects the life of the cellist as her army becomes increasingly threatening.

Successful advertising executive Michelle Turner steels herself for a difficult encounter with her past when she returns to the small Montana town where she grew up to donate a kidney to her estranged father, and to make peace with Sam McPhee, her ranch-hand lover--now a prosperous rancher and doctor--who left town seventeen years earlier before learning that she was pregnant with his child.

"Los Angeles Times" columnist Steve Lopez shares the story of his relationship with Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless violinist who captured his attention playing a two-stringed instrument on Skid Row, discussing his attempts to help Ayers--once a promising student at Juilliard--