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In 1949, jazz pianist Sonny-Rhett Payne leaves New York for Paris, where he will be free from racism and his family's disapproval of his music. Three decades later, Sonny's grandson comes to New York for a memorial concert. On the Harlem street where his grandfather grew up, the eight-year-old begins to understand the forces that drove Sonny into exile.

T. Coraghessan Boyle weaves together the stories of two families in Southern California--one affluent, the other destitute. As Boyle creates a counterpoint of personal needs, civic responsibility, and social custom, each family's quest for the American Dream fuels a deep fear and anger that ultimately lead to a perilous confrontation.

Beginning with an engagement announcement and ending with the birth of a son, the author gives a charming and utterly convincing snapshot of the first few years of a modern Southern marriage.

October Brown, an African-American teacher at a private school in Kansas, becomes pregnant by the father of a student and returns home to Ohio, where she and her sister were raised by their aunts after their father killed their mother 20 years before. Confused and unhappy, October gives the baby to her sister and goes back to teaching. Then she regrets her decision.

Nora Bondurant is divorced--unfathomable for a woman in 1933--and has inherited a house from a dead aunt she never even knew existed. But when she travels to Mississippi to claim her inheritance, she finds her eccentric neighbors would rather help her acquire a new husband than reveal the secrets surrounding her aunt's death.

On a train bound for Nalgitas, New Mexico, hookhouse proprietor Addie French encounters Emma Roby, a prim and proper lady seeking a new life with a man she's never met. But when they reach Nalgitas, all that awaits the bride-to-be is a "Dear Emma" note left with the stationmaster. Alone and forlorn, Emma seeks lodging at Addie's Chili Queen, a bordello she assumes is a bording house. At first, the residents enjoy the delicious irony of Emma's naïveté. And yet as the yarn unravels, it's unclear who will have the last laugh.

In this charming tale of second chances, renewed faith, and forgiveness, a captivating heirloom triggers inexplicable changes.

For six years, Reginald Brooks--slick Disney marketing VP--has pulled off the perfect scam. He has juggled two families without the other one finding out. He stays two weeks in Miami with his wife and two young adult daughters and the next two weeks in Orlando with his trophy mistress and their young daughter. But when the charade unravels, it's clear there's been a lot more pretending than anyone realized. Soon wide-ranging consequences begin to take their toll.

Terrell has asked her sister Ella to conceal Terrell's adulterous affair from the family. When Terrell dies in a plane crash just hours later en route to meet her lover, the lie takes on a life of its own, and Ella eventually finds herself falling in love with Rufus, Terrell's grieving spouse.

A confused and lonely ten-year-old girl, Marsha, a witness to her siblings' deviant behavior, her father's affair, and her mother's flirtation with the new neighbor, produces the only lead in a case of sexual assault and murder.