"From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel following a New Mexican family's extraordinary year of love and sacrifice. It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans....

In the summer before college, eighteen-year-old Blake Brenner works to join the exclusive Serena Society with her girlfriend, and turns to alcohol to cope with the pressure of pledging, as her pursuit of success begins to strain her relationships.

"Majella is happiest out of the spotlight, living a quiet life away from neighbors' stares and the gossips of the small town in Northern Ireland where she grew up during the Troubles. But underneath her seemingly predictable existence, she doesn't know where her father is, and every person in her town has been changed by the lingering divide between Protestants and Catholics. When Majella's grandmother dies, she comes to realize there may be more...

"For wedding singer Mel Hart, the holidays have always retained a certain magic. Her mother, Connie, always managed to pull off spectacular Santa hijinx that convinced Mel to keep believing in Santa way longer than other kids. Those moments meant everything to Mel because the rest of the year, life was unpredictable because of her mother's alcohol use. But two weeks before Christmas, Mel gets a call from the hospital: her mother has died. Then a woman...

Nate Beckett has spent his life fighting wildfires instead of the lies and rumors that drove him from his Colorado home town. His mother begs him to come to Carlisle now that his father has been released from prison, but it isn't until he's sidelined by an injury that he's forced to return and face his past. But that means facing Brenna too. Fourteen years ago, Nate was in love with the preacher's daughter. When Pastor Strickland discovered Brenna...

"Lahore, Pakistan. Then. Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start. Juniper, California. Now. Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else...

While struggling to cope with her alcoholic boyfriend's betrayal that put her sister in a coma, seventeen-year-old Harley reconnects with neighbor Raf, who is facing his own demons after rehab.

After her mother's death, Julie goes to live with Aunt Cordelia, a spinster schoolteacher, where she experiences many emotions and changes as she grows from seven to eighteen.

Joey, who is still taking medication to keep him from getting too wired, goes to spend the summer with the hard-drinking father he has never known and tries to help the baseball team he coaches win the championship.

Maverick Falconer is just starting middle school and he wishes he were a hero like his father because maybe then he could deal with his mother's drinking and series of abusive boyfriends, not to mention the kids who bully him in middle school (pretty much the same ones who bullied him in elementary school)--but as the year passes he begins to realize that other kids have problems too, and maybe if they can all survive sixth-grade things will get better....