Anny Butler is a caretaker, a nurturer, first for her own brothers and sisters, and then as a director of an agency devoted to the welfare of children. What she has never had is a real family. That changes when she meets and marries Lewis Aiken, an exuberant surgeon fifteen years older than Anny. When they marry, she finds her family-not a traditional one, but a group of Charleston childhood friends who are inseparable, who are one another's surrogate...

Molly Bell Redwine, shattered when her husband deserts her, her mother dies, and her grown children leave to make their own lives, seeks refuge with friends in Martha's Vineyard where she decides to stay and try to come to grips with her changing identity.

Left virtually alone after the disappearance of her mother and death of her beloved older brother, Emily Parmenter has built a life around the plantation where her remote father and hunter-obsessed brothers raise their legendary hunting spaniels. It is a narrow world, but to Emily it has magic: deep-sea dolphins who play in Sweetwater Creek; her extraordinary bond with the dogs she trains; her almost mystic communion with her own spaniel, Elvis;

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Peyton is not ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone a barely remembered cousin who just rolled into town. However, her father seems to like Nora well enough, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which raises Nora slightly in Peyton's esteem. Maybe Nora is just what quiet Lytton, Georgia needs this summer. The whole household is revitalized by Nora's energy, and it looks like she might stay on forever. But soon it becomes clear that...

The year is 1966, a time of innocence, possibility, and freedom. And for Atlanta, the country, and one woman making her way in a changing world, nothing will be the same . . . After an airless childhood in Savannah, Smoky O'Donnell arrives in Atlanta, dazzled and chastened by this hectic young city on the rise. Her new job as a writer with the city's Downtown magazine introduces her to many unforgettable people and propels her into the center of momentous...

Anne Rivers Siddons's New York Times bestselling novel about four friends whose lives are forever changed by the events of one summer.
For fifteen years, four "girls of August" would gather together to spend a week at the beach, until tragedy interrupts their ritual. Now they reunite for a startling week of discoveries.
The ritual began when they were in their twenties and their husbands were in medical school, and became a mainstay...