Bernadette Fox is notorious. To Elgie Branch, a Microsoft wunderkind, she's his hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled wife. To fellow mothers at the school gate, she's a menace. To design experts, she's a revolutionary architect. And to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend, and quite simply, mum. Then Bernadette disappears. And Bee must take a trip to the end of the earth to find her. Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a compulsively readable, irresistibly written, deeply touching novel.

They're a glamorous family, the Caseys. Johnny Casey, his two brothers Ed and Liam, their beautiful, talented wives and all their kids spend a lot of time together - birthday parties, anniversary celebrations, weekends away. And they're a happy family. Johnny's wife, Jessie - who has the most money - insists on it. Under the surface, though, conditions are murkier. While some people clash, other people like each other far too much.... Everything stays under control until Ed's wife Cara, gets concussion and can't keep her thoughts to herself.

When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as "Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue." This meant nothing to Kelly, who left childhood sure that her mom - with her inviolable commandments and proud stoicism - would be nothing more than background chatter for the rest of Kelly’s life, which she was carefully orienting toward adventure. After college, armed with a backpack, her personal mission statement, and a wad of traveler’s checks, she took off for Australia to see things and do things and Become Interesting.

Jessica and her daughter Emily are touring colleges. For Jessica, this is going to be the chance to reconnect with the daughter she seems to have lost. But for Emily, it's a preview of freedom and the chance to explore a new and exciting future. Yet before any of this can happen, their perfectly planned trip is derailed into a series of off-roading misadventures. With seatbelts fastened, physical and emotional baggage safely stowed away, this mother-daughter duo might be ready to hit the road, but are they ready to reconnect to the person sitting next to them?

In the title story, we meet Maya, who is torn between her wryly funny boyfriend and the allure of her veterinarian. In "Andorra," a woman's lover calls her every Thursday as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counselling. "How to Give the Wrong Impression" shows us a woman pining for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tell her that her palm is sweaty.

Daisy Shoemaker can't sleep. With a thriving cooking business, full schedule of volunteer work and a home in the Philadelphia suburbs, she should be content. But her teenage daughter can be a handful, her husband can be distant, her work can feel trivial and she has lots of acquaintances, but no real friends. Still, Daisy knows she's got it good. So why is she up all night? While Daisy tries to identify the root of her dissatisfaction, she's also receiving misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. 

Now Cannie's back. After her debut novel - a fictionalized (and highly sexualized) version of her life - became an overnight bestseller, she dropped out of the public eye and turned to writing science fiction under a pseudonym. She's happily married and has settled into a life that's wonderfully predictable. As preparations for her daughter Joy's bat mitzvah begin, everything seems right in Cannie's world. Then Joy discovers the novel Cannie wrote years before and suddenly finds herself faced with what she thinks is the truth about her own conception - the story her mother hid.

Addie Downs and Valerie Adler will be best friends forever. That’s what Addie believes after Valerie moves across the street when they’re both nine years old. But in their teenage years, Val is swept into the popular crowd. Flash-forward 15 years. Addie Downs lives alone in her parents’ house, caring for a troubled brother and trying to meet Prince Charming on the Internet. she opens her door to find her long-gone best friend standing there, a terrified look on her face and blood on the sleeve of her coat.

College friends Elizabeth, Zoe and Andrew had a band, grew up, settled in New York and now they were still living round the corner from one another (and in each other's pockets). One hot summer as their kids come of age, making those first hesitant steps into adulthood, it's the parents who find that the lives they've so carelessly stitched together begin to slowly unravel.... 

This is a novel about what happens when - just occasionally - we can live happily ever after. Vincent is pretty certain he will win a Nobel Prize for physics. When he meets Holly, he loves her on sight. Guido plans to write poetry, and when Misty - bored and misanthropic - steps into his office, he finds himself desperate to know her. Through courtship, jealousy, estrangement and other perils, we watch as the two couples manage to find love in spite of themselves.

The Fisher family of Alluvia, New York, is coming undone. Evelyn spends her days tending to her husband, Henry - an acclaimed and reclusive novelist slowly losing his battle with Alzheimer's. Their son, Benji, onetime star of an '80s sitcom called Prodigy, sinks deeper into drunken obscurity, railing against the bit roles he's forced to take in uncelebrated regional theater.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lindsey Rose has, for as long as she can remember, lived in the shadow of her ravishingly beautiful fraternal twin sister, Alex. Determined to get noticed, Lindsey is finally on the cusp of being named VP creative director of an elite New York advertising agency, after years of 80-plus-hour weeks, migraines and profound loneliness. But during the course of one devastating night, Lindsey’s carefully constructed life implodes. 

The theme that unites these stories in this dazzling first collection by Curtis Sittenfeld is how even the cleverest people tend to misread others and how much we all deceive ourselves. Sharp and tender, funny and wise, this collection shows Sittenfeld’s knack for creating real, believable characters while also skewering contemporary mores with brilliant dry wit. 

For some boys fitting in means standing out. Meet Frank - he isn't like other kids. Intrepid explorer, sartorial connoisseur; he's as strange as he is brilliant. But Frank discovers the hard way that people don't like brilliant, and they hate strange. What Frank longs for - aside from a father - is a friend. 

It's 1969, and holed up in a grimy tenement building in New York's Lower East Side is a travelling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the date they will die. Four siblings, too young for what they are about to hear, sneak out to hear their fortunes. We then follow the intertwined paths the siblings take over the course of five decades and, in particular, how they choose to live with the supposed knowledge the fortune-teller gave them that day. This is a story about life, mortality and the choices we make.