A collection of moving short stories thematically linked by the emotion of loneliness follows a collection of varied characters as they search for relationships, only to find meaningful connections in the unlikeliest places. Winner of the Flannery O'Connar Award for Short Fiction.

"An important and vital story." — Donna Everhart, USA Today bestselling author of The Saints of Swallow Hill "Engaging, shocking, heart-wrenching." — Library Journal A "compassionate novel about loss and broken dreams." — Washington Post A searing book club read for fans of Ellen Marie Wiseman and The Girls with No Names set in the Baby Scoop Era of the 1960s about the women of a certain condition swept up in a dark history. It's the 1960s and Lorraine Delford has it all – an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and a white picket fence home in North Carolina. Yet every time she looks through her father's telescope, she dreams of the stars. It's ambitious, but Lorraine has always been exceptional. But when this darling girl-next-door gets pregnant, she's forced to learn firsthand the realities that keep women grounded. To hide their daughter's secret shame, the Delfords send Lorraine to a maternity home for wayward girls. But this is no safe haven – it's a house with dark secrets and suffocating rules. And as Lorraine begins to piece together a new vision for her life, she must decide if she can fight against the powers that aim to take her child or submit to the rules of a society she once admired. Powerful and affecting, The Girls We Sent Away is a timely novel that explores autonomy, belonging, and a quest for agency when the illusions of life-as-you-know-it fall away.

Toby Sedgwick is terrified by his daughter's increasingly reckless behavior and takes a tough love approach, enrolling Ava in Mount Hope, a wilderness behavioral camp for troubled teens. Ava quickly realizes that the camp is little more than a prison, warehousing and abusing kids for their parents' money. And after spending a disturbing weekend completing the parent portion of treatment, Toby knows it too. As Ava desperately searches for a way out of Mount Hope, she is faced with resurfacing memories of a family tragedy-she can no longer suppress the pain of what happened to her mother and sister eight years earlier in Thailand. As father and daughter fight to get back to each other, the truth may irrevocably tear them apart.

The astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. “It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the oral histories of these women and by the courage and candor with which they express themselves.” —The Washington Post “A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” —The New York Times Book Review “A wrenching, riveting book.” —Chicago Tribune In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the hidden social history of adoption before Roe v. Wade - and its lasting legacy. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.