Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything—which is why she isn’t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia’s brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

“Pat, we need to kill the dog.” When a sudden mental illness struck his wife, Patrick Dylan found himself living with an eerie stranger. Scared and unprepared, he began a desperate battle to protect her from a mysterious disease, shelter their children from her bizarre behavior, and recover the woman he loved. Within weeks, she had been admitted to the emergency room, the hospital, and the local crisis facility, but none of the experts could provide an answer. As her illness eluded diagnosis, the family’s struggle was only beginning.

After only a year of marriage, Pavel Ythjall found himself staring into the eyes of a neurosurgeon who told him point-blank: “Your wife will be paralyzed, neck down, for life.” At the time, Pavel had a broken neck, too. His vertebrae were supported by a halo screwed directly into his skull. A tragic accident on the way to a Christmas party had changed their lives forever.

Scheier’s mother Judith was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, a fast-talking charmer you couldn’t look away from, a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and—when in the grips of the mental illness that plagued every day of her life—a violent and abusive liar whose hold on reality was shaky at best. On an uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room to tell her two important things.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes that flash between the US and the Middle East, we trace her progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer.

Skye Starling is overjoyed when her boyfriend, Burke Michaels, proposes after a whirlwind courtship. Though Skye seems to have the world at her fingertips - she’s smart, beautiful, and from a well-off family - she’s also battled crippling OCD ever since her mother’s death when she was 11, and her romantic relationships have suffered as a result.

The refreshingly original and “startlingly hopeful” (Lisa Taddeo) debut memoir of an over-achieving young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to group therapy and gets psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers - and finds human connection, and herself.

Alice Hunter is smarting from the raw deal life has thrown her way: suddenly single, jobless and forced to move home to her parents' tiny seaside town. And now she faces an uncomfortable truth. She wants her twin sister Libby's enviable life. Libby's closest friend Jess Dekic has been around the Hunter family for so long she might as well be blood. She's always considered herself a sister closer to Libby than Alice ever could be.

Intimacy has always eluded 27-year-old Maggie Krause - despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss - until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie’s mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris' will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of. In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris - who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter's sexuality - Maggie embarks on a road trip.

When her 22-year-marriage suddenly ended, 47-year-old mother of three Laura expected life as she knew it to be over. From G-spots to bald spots, dirty talk to dating fiascos, Available is the unflinchingly honest, empowering and humorous true story of one woman’s love life after divorce.

Call Brook Ogden a matchmaker in reverse. Let others bring people together; Brook, licensed mental health counselor, picks up the pieces after things come apart. When her own therapy practice collapses, she lands on her feet with a weekly advice-to-the-lovelorn column and a successful consulting service as the Breakup Doctor. But when her own relationship suddenly crumbles, Brook finds herself engaging in almost every bad breakup behavior she preaches against.

Growing up abandoned by her father and raised by a single mother, Celeste was determined to create the perfect family - but even perfect families have secrets. Her days are filled with a rewarding career, a devoted husband, and her four-year-old daughter. Celeste is the only one who knows the precarious house of cards her family is built upon - until the day her daughter falls critically ill. Then her world quickly spirals out of control, her secret threatening to destroy her marriage, family, reputation, and sanity.

When Hannah meets Mark during a chance encounter, she finds herself saying yes to him for the first time. With an immediate first date, the two begin a whirlwind romance. Soon, Hannah is saying yes to everything Mark asks of her. These decisions quickly alter the world she once knew. Within months, they become inseparable, and she says yes to moving, marriage, and unbeknownst to her, a new existence filled with secrets, lies, and questions Hannah never thought she'd have to ask her husband.

Gen is on the verge of a divorce from her cheating husband. When her sister, Meg, has a convention to attend in the Big Apple, she invites Gen along to celebrate her newly found freedom. But the perfect sisters’ getaway quickly goes awry when a tipsy Gen defiantly throws her wedding ring off the hotel room’s balcony. Then, wanting some fresh air, she decides to take a late-evening walk alone and vanishes without a trace.