Anne Rivers Siddons

"Every August, four women would gather together to spend a week at the beach, renting a new house each year. The ritual began when they were in their twenties and their husbands were in medical school, and became a mainstay of every summer thereafter. Their only criteria was oceanfront and isolation, their only desire to strengthen their far-flung friendships. They called themselves the Girls of August. But when one of the Girls dies tragically, the...

A grieving widow takes a solitary road trip to her late husband's favorite getaway on pristine coastal Maine, where she remembers their many happy years of family life, reevaluates the time before they met, and considers her future.

Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable comes to live with her cousin's family in the great house on Peachtree Road, and the story of astonishing love and hate between a man and a woman begins.

Forced to return to her hometown in Georgia, Mike Winship Singer, a divorced free-lance artist, tries to come to terms with her past and her dying, bigoted father.

Andy Calhoun comes back to the Old South with her small daughter, but her newfound happiness is threatened when her friend Tom Dabney opposes a nearby nuclear arms plant.

Nora Findlay, a motherless child who breaks all the rules, arrives in Lytton, Georgia, in 1961 at the age of thirteen and proceeds to shake up the town with her rebellious ways.