First Thursday

A family of men--three brothers and their widowed father--respond to an ad in the newspaper for a housekeeper who "can't cook but doesn't bite." The relocation of the ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, to Marias Coulee has a profound effect on the lives of the Milliron men, as well as the rest of the community.

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark's accident, threaten to change all their lives beyond recognition.

Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing that she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man named Leo Gursky is trying to survive a litte bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn't know it yet, that book also survived, crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives.

Instantly recognizable, Auguste Renoir's masterpiece portrays fourteen lively, diverse and elegant Parisians enjoying a summer Sunday along the Seine. An art collector, an Italian journalist, a war hero, a wealthy painter, a celebrated actress, and Renoir's future wife are among those sharing this joyous moment of le vie moderne. But who were they really and what were their lives truly like? Narrated by Renoir and seven of the models, and using settings in Paris and along the Seine, Susan Vreeland's vibrant novel recreates the lives, loves, losses and triumphs to illuminate the gusto, hedonism and art of the era.

After a startling diagnosis from his doctor, Oswald T. Campbell leaves behind the cold and damp of the oncoming Chicago winter to spend what he believes will be his last Christmas in the warm and welcoming town of Lost River. There he meets the postman who delivers mail by boat, the store owner who nurses a broken heart, and the ladies of the Mystic Order of the Royal Polka Dots Secret Society, who do clandestine good works. And he meets a little redbird named Jack, who is at the center of this tale of a magical Christmas when something so amazing happened that those who witnessed it have never forgotten it.