Ruth is a young orphaned girl who works in a sweatshop. Mrs. Mason, Ruth's boss, runs the sweatshop in a respectable manner, earning a sterling reputation among her employees and society. However, the comfort and acclaim of Ruth's job is threatened when she attends a ball to repair any dresses that get torn during dancing. There, she meets an aristocratic man named Henry Bellingham, who is infamous for his immoral treatment of women and frivolous...

Halley's junior year of high school includes the death of her best friend Scarlett's boyfriend, the discovery that Scarlett is pregnant, and Halley's own first serious relationship.

"With her divorce settlement about to run out and a mortgage she can't afford, Robyn Caldwell needs a plan. But how's she supposed to think when her daughter has become the most demanding bride ever, her son won't even consider college, her best friend is on the brink of marital disaster and her ex is making a bad decision that could bring everything crashing down on Robyn's head? When her great-aunt Lillian invites her to Santa Barbara for the summer,...

Novel by Theodore Dreiser, published in 1911. It exemplifies the naturalism of which Dreiser was a proponent, telling the unhappy story of a working-class woman who accepts all the adversity life visits on her and becomes the mistress of two wealthy and powerful men in order to help her impoverished family. --The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature.

The plans of four women--including a college student egg donor, a working-class surrogate mother, a wealthy woman, and her stepdaughter--are thrown into turmoil when the wealthy woman's husband suddenly dies and names the stepdaughter the unborn baby's guardian.

Delightfully smart and heartbreakingly poignant, Allison Pearson’s smash debut novel has exploded onto bestseller lists as “The national anthem for working mothers.” Hedge-fund manager, wife, and mother of two, Kate Reddy manages to juggle nine currencies in five time zones and keep in step with the Teletubbies. But when she finds herself awake at 1:37 a.m. in a panic over the need to produce a homemade pie for her daughter’s...

"Teen mother Emoni Santiago struggles with the challenges of finishing high school and her dream of working as a chef." --

"When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days, decades years earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she'd been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? Astrid's youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give...

Emma London never thought she had anything in common with her grandmother Genevieve London. The regal old woman came from wealthy and bluest-blood New England stock, but that didn't protect her from life's cruelest blows: the disappearance of Genevieve's young son, followed by the premature death of her husband. But Genevieve rose from those ashes of grief and built a fashion empire that was respected the world over, even when it meant neglecting...

"John 'Preacher' Middleton is about to close the bar when a young woman and her three-year-old son come in out of the wet October night. A marine who has seen his share of pain, Preacher knows a crisis when he sees one - the woman is covered in bruises. He wants to protect them, and to punish whoever did this, but he knows immediately that this is more than just instinct. Paige Lassiter has stirred up emotions in this gentle giant of a man - emotions...