The lives and fortunes of two New Hampshire families, the Planks and the Dickersons, are entwined through the youngest daughters of each family, who were born on the same day in the same hospital.

It's a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn---a perfect September day. Wendy is heading to school, eager to make plans with her best friend, worried about how she looks, mad at her mother for not letting her visit her father in California, impatient with her little brother and with the almost too-loving concern of her jazz musician stepfather. She's out the door to catch the bus. An hour later comes the news: A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center---her...

Maynard's captivating novel of four teenage girls, bound together by early motherhood and forever changed by the arrival of two women in their small New England town. In their New Hampshire community, Sandy, Jill, Tara, and Wanda are different from other teenage girls. Jill is pregnant, while the other three are already mothers. Sandy, at eighteen, is married. Tara, the product of a broken family, is raising her baby alone. Wanda, with her three-month-old,...

A special anniversary edition of Joyce Maynard's groundbreaking memoir about coming of age in one of America's most defining decades. Joyce Maynard was eighteen years old when her 1972 New York Times Magazine cover story catapulted her to national prominence. Published one year later, Looking Back is her remarkable follow-up: part memoir, part cultural history, and part social critique. She wrote about diving under her desk for air-raid practice during...

On Mother’s Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet. Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seamana successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs...

"As the end of summer approaches and a long, hot Labor Day weekend looms, the life of lonely thirteen-year-old Henry Wheeler is irrevocably changed when he and his emotionally fragile mother show kindness to a stranger with a terrible secret."--back cover.

Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She's an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters, and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin, and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted: summer nights watching Cam's softball games, snow days by the fire and the annual tradition of...

In 1966, when his father's attempted suicide causes the ostracism of the family in their small Montana community, fourteen-year-old Nate copes with his sadness and anger by trying to win the school science fair.

Thirteen-year-old Henry Wheeler struggles to be the man of his house and care for his reclusive mother Adele, all the while confronting the pangs of adolescence. Henry and his mother encounter Frank Chambers, an intimidating man clearly in need of help. Frank convinces them to take him into their home and later is revealed to be an escaped convict. The events of this long Labor Day weekend will shape them for the rest of their lives.