Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress.

As they hurtle into midlife, Jim and his closest college friends get together to rekindle the bonds of their friendship in his family’s beautiful, generations-old vacation home along Buzzards Bay, the demands of work and family having caused them to drift apart over recent years. But what begins as a quiet and restorative seaside escape takes a darker turn when Bruce, an aloof but successful writer, disappears from the house without a trace, sending the group into an uneasy tension. Meanwhile, a series of mysterious break-ins besets the town.

Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over. Unfortunately, her father had other plans.

From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.

Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York’s cultural elite. Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she’d quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave him. Yet.

When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later. From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep.

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At nineteen, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart?

Lottie Jones thought her crimes were behind her. Decades earlier, she changed her identity and tucked herself away in a small town. Her most exciting nights are the weekly bingo games at the local church and gossiping with her friends. When investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up on her doorstep asking questions about Lottie’s past and specifically her involvement with numerous unsolved cases, well, Lottie just can’t have that. But getting away with murder is hard enough when you’re young.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter. 2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible.

Sunny Greene is thirty-five, recently divorced, facing the looming prospect of going solo to her little brother’s wedding, and currently trying to find anything plus-sized in the Bergdorf Goodman swimsuit department that doesn’t make her want to cry. It’s not going well. But isn’t rock bottom the perfect place to start a climb? She decides it’s now or never. Sunny has her PR empire, her gorgeous Chelsea apartment, her two dogs, and her loyal best friends. Maybe it's time to just love her body and accept herself for who she is.

Lizzie and Bex were best friends in college. After graduation, Bex vanished, leaving Lizzie confused and devastated. Fifteen years later, Bex is now Rebecca Sommers, a “traditional” Instagram influencer with millions of followers who salivate over her perfect life on her ranch with her five children and handsome husband, Gray. Lizzie is a struggling magazine writer, watching reels while her young children demand her attention. One night out of the blue, Bex calls Lizzie with a career-making proposition.

In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break: For three months she would abstain from dating, relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another with men and women. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster.

It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the Manhattan streets below. Initially, Leo believes the visions are related to his terrible eyesight, something he and his wife, Addie, joke about. Then, he starts to experience occasional, but fleeting, oddities. He's unable to perform simple tasks and he hears things that aren’t real. The doctors have no answers, and his erratic disturbances multiply.

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child.

Honor seems to have everything: she adores her bright and beautiful daughter, Chloe, and her charming, handsome husband, Tom, even if he works one hundred hours a week. Yet Honor’s longing for another baby threatens to eclipse all of it―until a shocking event changes their lives forever. Years later, Tom makes a decision that ripples through their families' lives in ways he could never have foreseen.

A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie. Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation.

Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over. Unfortunately, her father had other plans.

Beatrice Nilsson is what some might call “feisty” (those who love her) and others “combative” (those who don’t). But no matter what you call her, she’s a good lawyer and an even better friend. So when the marriage of her two closest pals ends in divorce, Bea picks a side and storms the office of attorney Nathan Asher to tell him exactly what he can do with his alimony petition. Unfortunately, what should end with a few choice words soon spirals into uncharted territory when Nate shows up at her NYU Law office a few days later as a newly-minted adjunct professor—and her new colleague.

Immigrating alone from Paris to New York after the crucible of World War II, young Gazala becomes friends with two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala’s lost, beloved brother, Samir, joins her in Manhattan, this contentious, inseparable foursome makes their way into the twenty-first century, becoming the beating heart of a multigenerational found family.

Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P. has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the university, living with her boyfriend, a fellow academic, and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. Her sister’s sprawling family lives just across the street, and their long-divorced, deeply complicated parents have also recently moved to town. One day, Hana learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently—and soon—in her ex-husband’s debut novel.

When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later. From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep.

On an ordinary summer morning, the world is changed by the appearance of seven mysterious doors that seemingly lead to another world. People are, of course, mesmerized and intrigued: A new dimension filled with beauty and resources beckons them to step into an adventure. But, perhaps inevitably, people soon learn that what looks like paradise may very well be filled with danger.

All I want is to be innocent again. But that's not how it works. Especially not after the Wheel. The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in the moneyed suburbs of Detroit. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Harper, the youngest, is barely making ends meet when her beloved, charismatic sister Pam—currently in the middle of a contentious battle with her ex-husband—and her eldest sister, Debra, approach her about joining an exciting new club.

Vivienne and Patrick Fisher have done an excellent job raising their three daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva. They’re well-adjusted women with impressive careers, caring partners, exciting hobbies, and sweet children. So it’s with great anticipation that three generations of Fishers gather at a beautiful glass house in the English countryside for a weeklong celebration of Vivienne’s seventieth birthday. But when Patrick’s reaction to a freak accident on the first day of the trip inadvertently reveals that he has a favorite daughter, no one is prepared for the shockwaves it sends.

A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep.

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart?

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.

Big-hearted evocative, and achingly relatable, What We Leave Behind grapples with destiny, belonging, and love, and makes us question our own idea of family: the kind we’re born into and the kind we create.