Jamie’s an aspiring standup comic in Los Angeles with a growing case of stage anxiety. Siri’s a stunning ballerina from New Jersey nursing a career-changing injury. They’ve both signed up for the same session at an off the grid Re-Discover Yourself Retreat in Colorado. When they run into each other, their worlds turn upside down.

The many lives of theoretical physicist Elsie Hannaway have finally caught up with her. By day, she’s an adjunct professor, toiling away at grading labs and teaching thermodynamics in the hopes of landing tenure. By other day, Elsie makes up for her non-existent paycheck by offering her services as a fake girlfriend, tapping into her expertly honed people-pleasing skills to embody whichever version of herself the client needs. Honestly, it’s a pretty sweet gig—until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse comes crashing down.

Maggie, Eliza, and Tricia Sweeney grew up as a happy threesome in a seaside town in Connecticut. But after their mother’s death from cancer 15 years ago, the sisters drifted apart. Their one touchstone is their father, Bill Sweeney, a famous literary lion universally adored by critics, publishers, and book lovers. When Bill dies unexpectedly one cool June night, his shell-shocked daughters return to their childhood home. They aren’t quite sure what the future holds without their larger-than-life father, but they do know how to throw an Irish wake to honor a man of his stature.

Nora, the owner of a diner, is happy serving up apple cider donuts. But her life is soon shaken when she discovers she and her younger sister Kit stand to inherit the home and land of the town's beloved cake lady, Peggy Johnson. Kit, an aspiring - and broke - filmmaker thinks her problems are solved when she and Nora find out Peggy was in the process of selling the land to a big-box developer.

It’s 2 AM on a Saturday night in the spring of 2001, and 28-year-old Cecily Gardner sits alone in a dive bar in New York’s East Village, questioning her life. Feeling lonesome and homesick for the Midwest, she wonders if she’ll ever make it as a reporter in the big city - and whether she made a terrible mistake in breaking up with her longtime boyfriend, Matthew.

Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.

Belly measures her life in summers. Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer, a place away from the beach house, away from Susannah, and most importantly, away from Jeremiah and Conrad. They are the boys that Belly has known since her very first summer—they have been her brother figures, her crushes, and everything in between. But one summer, one wonderful and terrible summer, the more everything changes, the more it all ends up just the way it should have been all along.

When Valentina Baker was only 11 years old, her mother, Eloise, unexpectedly fled to her native London, leaving Val and her father on their own in California. Now a librarian in her 30s, fresh out of a failed marriage and still at odds with her mother’s abandonment, Val feels disenchanted with her life.

Twenty years ago, ex-beauty queen Didi Storm worked the Vegas strip as a celebrity impersonator. Now, in death, she’s finally getting the publicity she always craved. To the police, it looks like suicide, or a stunt gone wrong. Her estranged daughter, Remmi, knows the answer isn’t so simple. Though dressed in Didi’s clothes and wig, the broken body on the sidewalk isn’t Didi...

Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it. So Clementine forms a plan to keep her heart safe: work hard, find someone decent to love, and try to remember to chase the moon. The last one is silly and obviously metaphorical, but her aunt always told her that you needed at least one big dream to keep going. And for the last year, that plan has gone off without a hitch. Mostly. The love part is hard because she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone—she isn’t sure her heart can take it.

As a third-year PhD candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships—but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees.

American Ella Durran has had the same plan for her life since she was 13: study at Oxford. At 24, she’s finally made it to England on a Rhodes Scholarship when she’s offered an unbelievable position in a rising political star’s presidential campaign. With the promise that she’ll work remotely and return to DC at the end of her Oxford year, she’s free to enjoy her Once in a Lifetime Experience. That is until a smart-mouthed local who is too quick with his tongue and his car ruins her shirt and her first day.

Hi, my name is Bree Camden, and I’m hopelessly in love with my best friend and star quarterback Nathan Donelson (so is half of America, judging by the tabloids and how much the guy dates). The first step is admitting it, right? Except, I can never admit it to him because he clearly doesn’t see me that way, and the last thing I want is for things to get weird between us. Nothing but good old-fashioned no-touching-the-sexiest-man-alive platonic friendship for us! Everything is exactly how I like it! Yes. Good. (I’m not crying; I’m just peeling an onion.)

After living through a dumpster fire of a Valentine’s Day, Emilie Hornby escapes to her grandmother’s house for some comfort and a consolation pint of Ben & Jerry’s. She passes out on the couch, but when she wakes up, she’s back home in her own bed—and it’s Valentine’s Day all over again. And the next day? Another horrendous V-Day. Emilie is stuck in some sort of time loop nightmare that she can’t wake up from as she re-watches her boyfriend, Josh, cheat on her day after day.

Evil is alive in Libertyville. It inhabits a custom-painted red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine and young Arnold Cunningham, who buys it. Along with Arnold's girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, Dennis Guilder attempts to find out the real truth behind Christine and finds more than he bargained for: From murder to suicide, there's a peculiar feeling that surrounds Christine - she gets revenge on anyone standing in her path. Can Dennis save Arnold from the wrath of Christine?

Eschewing trendy self-care fixes or the latest health fads, Your Time to Thrive is the revolutionary guide to living and working based on microsteps - tiny science-backed changes. By making them too small to fail, we can incorporate them into our daily lives right away and begin building healthier ways of living and working. Your Time to Thrive shares practical, usable, research-supported mini-habits that will yield huge benefits and empower people to truly thrive in all parts of their lives.

Tradition says there are three ways to grow a company's revenue: fire up the sales team with empty promises, cut costs and downsize, or cook the books. But what if there's a better way, a way that nine amazingly profitable and well-run companies are already embracing.

Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author's Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media.

We may not realize it consciously, but negative feelings can be as toxic as physical poisons, wearing on us and causing depression, illness, and burnout. But how can we keep ourselves safe in a world too often ruled by resentment, jealousy, rage, and stress?

Which will you choose: the path of least resistance or the path of potentially greatest satisfaction? You may think that with a last name like his, Buffett has enjoyed a life of endless privilege. But the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett says that the only real inheritance handed down from his parents was a philosophy: Forge your own path in life. It is a creed that has allowed him to follow his own passions, establish his own identity, and reap his own successes.

You probably don't realise this, but every working day you replay and re-enact conflicts, dynamics and relationships from your past. Whether it's confusing an authority figure with a parent; avoiding conflict because of past squabbles with siblings; or suffering from imposter syndrome because of the way your family responded to success, when it comes to work we are all trapped in our own upbringings and the patterns of behaviour we learned while growing up.

Carey Nieuwhof wants to help you avoid and overcome life's seven hardest and most crippling challenges: cynicism, compromise, disconnectedness, irrelevance, pride, burnout, and emptiness. These are challenges that few of us expect but we all experience at some point. If you have yet to confront these obstacles, Carey provides clear tools and guidelines for anticipation and avoidance. If you already feel stuck in a painful experience or are wrestling with one of these challenges, he provides the steps you need to find a way out and a way forward into a more powerful and vibrant future.

Every moment in our life happens only once, and if we let it slip away, we lose it forever - an idea captured by the Japanese phrase ichigo ichie (pronounced itchy-GO itchy-A). Often spoken in Japan when greeting someone or saying goodbye, to convey that the encounter is unique and special, it is a tenet of Zen Buddhism and is attributed to a 16th-century master of the Japanese tea ceremony, or "ceremony of attention", whose intricate rituals compel us to focus on the present moment.

Based upon his weekly Harvard Business Review column (one of the most popular columns on HBR.com, receiving hundreds of thousands of unique page views a month), 18 Minutes clearly shows how busy people can cut through all the daily clutter and distractions and find a way to focus on those key items that are truly the top priorities in our lives.

In Leadershift, John C. Maxwell helps listeners make leadership changes that will positively enhance their organizational and personal growth. He does this by sharing the 11 shifts he made over the course of his long and successful leadership career. Each shift changed his trajectory and set him up for new and exciting achievements, strengthening and sustaining his leadership abilities and making him the admired leadership expert he is today.

Do you toss and turn at night with a knot in your stomach, worrying about your job, your family, work, your health, or relationships? Do you suffer from crippling shyness, obsessive doubts, or feelings of insecurity? Are you plagued by fears, phobias, or panic attacks? The truth is you can defeat your fears. In When Panic Attacks, Dr. Burns takes you by the hand and shows you how to overcome every conceivable kind of anxiety.

In this inspirational fable, Chris McNeely is a college football coach who is at the end of his rope after a hard-and-fast fall from the top of his profession. Now bankrupt and on the verge of losing his job, he has no idea what he's doing wrong or how to get back on track. Angry, worried, and desperate for help, Chris receives mysterious visits from five of history's greatest coaches: John Wooden, Buck O'Neil, Herb Brooks, Paul "Bear" Bryant, and Vince Lombardi.

In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel - and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time. With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives.

In How to Have Impossible Conversations, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay guide you through the straightforward, practical, conversational techniques necessary for every successful conversation—whether the issue is climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control. Boghossian and Lindsay teach the subtle art of instilling doubts and opening minds.

Was your mother preoccupied, distant, or even demeaning? Have you struggled with relationships - or with your own self-worth? Often, the grown children of emotionally absent mothers can't quite put a finger on what's missing from their lives. The children of abusive mothers, by contrast, may recognize the abuse - but overlook its lasting, harmful effects. Psychotherapist Jasmin Lee Cori has helped thousands of men and women heal the hidden wounds left by every kind of undermothering.