After receiving a call from a stranger about her son's ex-girlfriend being injured, Willa flies across the country to Baltimore to take care of her and her nine-year-old daughter.

"From the beloved and best-selling Anne Tyler, a sparkling new novel about misperception, second chances, and the sometimes elusive power of human connection. Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses...

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life, but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together--with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell ...

Two families awaiting the arrival of their adopted infant daughters from Korea meet at the airport. The families lives become interwined after the Donaldsons, a young American couple invite the Yazdan's, Maryam, her son and his Iranian American wife to an arrival party, which becomes an annual event. Maryam, who came to this country thirty-five years earlier, feels her values threatened when she is courted by a newly widowed Donaldson. A penetrating...

Upon waking up in a hospital bed in Baltimore with a major headache, recently retired teacher Liam Pennywell can't seem to remember how he got there. However, as he investigates the lapse in time, the outwardly miserable Liam is forced to come to terms with his life.

Timothy Tugbottom likes his old pants, his old crib, his old bedtime story, and his old breakfast, until he realizes that new things, including sleepovers, can be good too.

"Through the syncopated rhythms of the ragtime era to the thumping, rocking beats of the 1970s, generations of Pecks have maintained a determined steadiness. Adamantly middle class—Peck-proud, as the family slogan goes—they are quick to sweep under the rug those members who do not live up to their standards. Maybe that’s why Caleb Peck took off with his violincello as a boy? Sixty years later, his brother Daniel is still wondering. No longer...

On the surface Rebecca is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation, something she slipped into when Joe Davitch spotted her at a party in his family's Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. Soon this man, divorced and with three little girls, swept her into his orbit and, before she knew it, she was embracing his family plus a child of their own and hosting endless parties in the...