Last year, Amanda and her husband planned a special Christmas, carefully preparing a nursery and the keepsake ornaments for their newborn. Now that room stands as empty as her heart. When a neighbor's mishap turns into a last-minute chance for Amanda to take a much-needed vacation to tour the Holy Land, she discovers anew the miracle of the Christ child-- God incarnate as a tiny, vulnerable baby.

Nothing prepares Jaya, A New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family's past. Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it is Ravi -- her grandmother's former servant and trusted confidant -- who reveals the...

"From the author of the critically acclaimed The Illness Lesson ("astoundingly original"--NYTBR), comes a a page-turning and psychologically penetrating tale about the rules that govern women's bodies and lives. In 1948, Irene Willard, who's had five previous miscarriages in a quest to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires and is now pregnant again, comes to an isolated house-cum-hospital in the Berkshires, run by a husband-and-wife...