Gabby, Billy, Izzie, Andy, and Sean - each bursting with their own personality, strikingly different looks and talents, in sports, science, and the arts. Each drawn by the magical spark of connection that happens to the young. At the exclusive Atwood school, on a bright September day, starting in kindergarten they become an inseparable group known to outsiders as the Big Five. In this rarefied would, five families grow closer, and five children bloom...

In 1866 tragedy strikes at the exclusive Windfield School when a mysterious accident takes the life of a student. Among the student's circle of friends are Hugh Pilaster; Hugh's older cousin Edward, dissolute heir to the Pilaster banking fortune; and Micky Miranda, the handsome son of a brutal South American oligarchy. The death and its aftermath begin the spiraling circle of treachery that will span three decades and entwine many lives.

Bhima, a domestic servant in the household of Sera Dubash, an upper-class Parsi housewife, develops a bond with her employer over the course of many years as they both suffer through abusive marriages, loss, and disappointments, but their friendship still cannot overcome the restrictions of class and money.

At 14, Grace Reeves leaves home to work for her mother's former employers at Riverton House. She is the same age as Hannah, the headstrong middle child who visits her uncle, Lord Ashbury, at Riverton House with her siblings Emmeline and David. Fascinated, Grace observes their comings and goings and, as an invisible maid, is privy to the secrets she will spend a lifetime pretending to forget. But when a filmmaker working on a movie about the family...

Two stories in one volume Bonus story by Marie Ferrarella entitled Finding happily-ever-after. Ready for marriage (℗♭1994) "Three years ago, Mary Jo Summerhill fell completely and utterly in love with Evan Dryden. But she was a kindergarten teacher, and he was a Boston blue blood with political ambitions. His family said she was not the right kind of wife for Evan. Mary Jo agreed--she didn't belong in his world. So she lied, and broke his heart....

Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton; their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a...

"White Ivy begins as many coming-to-America stories do: Ivy Lin, a Chinese immigrant, grows up in a low-income apartment complex in Massachusetts desperate to assimilate with her American peers. She develops a crush on the golden boy Gideon Speyer, whose patrician New England family is the paragon of the WASP ideal. Ivy's mother is a Tiger Mom, berating Ivy regularly when she disapproves of her grades, her looks, her attitude. But that's where the...