Inseparable best friends Kate and Tully, two young women who, despite their very different lives, have vowed to be there for each other forever, have been true to their promise for thirty years, until events and choices in their lives tear them apart.

A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. A radical young Irish monk struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gathers in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life...

An early-1970s widow becomes increasingly dependent on the feminist activists her professor husband and she once disdained, before a frat party and a Vietnam War protest gone wrong threaten her daughter's prospects.

"The protagonists of these skillful and inventive stories have traveled various paths--from Japan to Brazil, L.A. to Gardena, San Francisco to Tokyo--but along the way, they have all become archivists, whether they know it or not. They examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high-school locker-room chatter, cart the contents of a household cross-country, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants....

"In 1973, twenty-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home in Ireland and disappears. Bewildered and distraught, Paddy and Kit must confront an unbearable prospect: that they will never see their daughter again. Five years later, Moll returns from London. What - and who - she brings with her will change the course of her family's life forever. Beautiful and devastating, this exploration of loss, alienation and the redemptive power...

In 1970s Brooklyn, with the promise of violence everywhere, a currency itself, this story of community, crime and gentrification chronicles more than 50 years of life in one neighborhood where the players write the headlines, the histories and the laws of the streets.

The all-too-human individuals who live within this extraordinary first novel are: Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's biggest fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Sam, two Long Island teenagers seduced by downtown's nascent punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter; his spunky, West Coast-transplant neighbor; and the detective trying to figure out what they all have...

"When Chess suggests a girls' trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance. Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato and rented by rock star Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites up-and-coming musician, Pierce Sheldon to join him, as well as Pierce's girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara. A chain of events leads to Mari writing one of the greatest horror novels...

On a hot, humid July morning, sixteen-year-old Cissy Pickering calmly and deliberately shoots her father in the back. To their Mississippi community, the death of well-regarded attorney Richard Pickering is a fascinating scandal. To Cissy's distraught mother, Caroline, it's an unforgivable crime. But in Cissy's troubled mind, killing her father was the only way she knew to save the two people she loves most in the world. For years, Cissy has endured...