A Grown Up Kind of Pretty is a powerful saga of three generations of women, plagued by hardships and torn by a devastating secret, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of family.Fifteen-year-old Mosey Slocumb -- spirited, sassy, and on the cusp of womanhood -- is shaken when a small grave is unearthed in the backyard, and determined to figure out why it's there. Liza, her stroke-ravaged mother, is haunted by choices she made as a teenager. But it is Jenny, Mosey's strong and big-hearted grandmother, whose maternal love braids together the strands of the women's shared past -- and who will stop at nothing to defend their future.

It starts as a game at a book group one night. Never Have I Ever... done something I shouldn't.

But Amy Whey has done something she shouldn't. And Roux, the glamorous newcomer to Amy's suburban neighbourhood, knows exactly what that is.

Roux promises she will go away - if Amy plays by her rules.

But Amy isn't prepared to lose everything. She's going to fight back, and in this escalating game of cat and mouse, there can be only one winner.

For 10 years Arlene has kept her promises, and God has kept His end of the bargain. Until now. When an old schoolmate from Possett turns up at Arlene's door in Chicago asking questions about Jim Beverly, former quarterback and god of Possett High, Arlene's break with her former hometown is forced to an end. At the same time, Burr, her long-time boyfriend, has raised an ultimatum: introduce him to her family or consider him gone. Arlene loves him dearly but knows her lily white (not to mention deeply racist)Southern Baptist family will not understand her relationship with an African American boyfriend. Reluctantly, Arlene bows to the pressure, and she and Burr embark on the long-avoided road trip back home. As Arlene digs through guilt and deception, her patched-together alibi begins to unravel, and she discovers how far she will go for love and a chance at redemption.

WITH EMPATHY, GRACE, HUMOR, AND PIERCING INSIGHT, THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GODS IN ALABAMA PENS A POWERFUL, EMOTIONALLY RESONANT NOVEL OF THE SOUTH THAT CONFRONTS THE TRUTH ABOUT FAMILY, RACE, AND THE DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN PERCEPTION AND REALITY-THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES ABOUT OUR ORIGINS AND WHO WE REALLY ARESuperheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs's weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comic-book convention, the usually level-headed graphic novel artist is swept off her barstool by a handsome and anonymous Batman. She remembers he was tall, black, and an excellent French kisser-but not much else.It turns out the Caped Crusader has left her with more than just a fond, fuzzy memory. That pink plus sign on the stick isn't wrong: she's having a baby-an unexpected but not unhappy development. She always wanted to fall in love and have a child, but as a young woman, she learned exactly what betrayal felt like. Now she's thirty-eight and dead single, having walked-no, run-away from every man she might have married, trying to avoid more loss, more regrets.Before Leia can break the news of her impending single-motherhood (including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional lily-white Southern family, her perfect stepsister Rachel's marriage implodes. Leia wants to help, but Rachel is married to the very man who broke her heart all those years ago. Worse, she learns her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Birchie, has been hiding her rapidly progressing dementia with the help of her lifelong best friend, Wattie. Birchie is Leia's only living paternal relative, a proper yet fierce woman who has long lived by her own rules in Birchville, Alabama, the small town her family founded generations back. Now this grande dame has started a row at the church fish fry that has set every tongue wagging, pitted neighbor against neighbor, and made it plain to Leia that her grandmother needs some serious looking after.Heading seven hundred miles south, Leia plans to put Birchie's affairs in order, clean out the big Victorian that has been in the Birch family for generations, and break the news of her blessed event. Yet just when Leia thinks she's got it all under control, she learns that illness is not the only thing Birchie's been hiding. Tucked away in a trunk in the attic is a dangerous secret with roots that reach all the way back to the Civil War. Its exposure threatens the family's freedom and future, and will change everything about how Leia sees herself and her sister, her unborn son and the possibilities of his absent father, and the warm and friendly-yet deeply flawed and contradictory-world she thinks she knows.Enchanting, wry, honest, and hopeful, The Almost Sisters compels us to explore our own origins and the stories we tell ourselves.

A fiercely independent divorce lawyer learns the power of family and connection when she receives a cryptic message from her estranged mother in this bittersweet, witty novel from the nationally bestselling author of Someone Else's Love Story and gods in Alabama-an emotionally resonant tale about the endurance of love and the power of stories to shape and transform our lives. Born in Alabama, Paula Vauss spent the first decade of her life on the road with her free-spirited young mother, Kai, an itinerant storyteller who blended Hindu mythology with southern oral tradition to re-invent their history as they roved. But everything, including Paula's birth name Kali Jai, changed when she told a story of her own-one that landed Kai in prison and Paula in foster care. Separated, each holding secrets of her own, the intense bond they once shared was fractured. These days, Paula has reincarnated herself as a tough-as-nails divorce attorney with a successful practice in Atlanta. While she hasn't seen Kai in fifteen years, she's still making payments on that Karmic debt-until the day her last check is returned in the mail, along with a mysterious note: "I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. We will meet again, and there will be new stories. You know how Karma works." Then Kai's most treasured secret literally lands on Paula's doorstep, throwing her life into chaos and transforming her from only child to older sister. Desperate to find her mother before it's too late, Paula sets off on a journey of discovery that will take her back to the past and into the deepest recesses of her heart. With the help of her ex-lover Birdwine, an intrepid and emotionally volatile private eye who still carries a torch for her, this brilliant woman, an expert at wrecking families, now has to figure out how to put one back together-her own. The Opposite of Everyone is a story about story itself, how the tales we tell connect us, break us, and define us, and how the endings and beginnings we choose can destroy us ...and make us whole. Laced with sharp humor and poignant insight, it is beloved New York Times bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson at her very best.

When Lena Fleet goes to college, she makes three promises to God: she will stop fornicating with every boy she meets; never tell another lie and never, ever go back to her hometown of Possett, Alabama. All she wants from God in return is that He makes sure the body is never found...But ten years later, it looks like God's going back on His deal. Lena's high school archenemy appears on her doorstep, looking for the golden haired football god who disappeared during their senior year. To make matters worse, her African Amercian boyfriend has issued her with an ultimatum - introduce him to her lily-white family or he's gone...While she would rather burn in a fire than let him meet her steel magnolia Aunt Florence, her half-mad Mama, her sweet-as-pecan-pie cousin Clarice and the rest of her eccentric and racist family, Lena realises it is time to go home to Alabama and confront the past once and for all...

Someone Else's Love Story is beloved and highly acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson's funny, charming, and poignant novel about science and miracles, secrets and truths, faith and forgiveness; about falling in love, and learning that things aren't always what they seem--or what we hope they will be.Shandi Pierce is juggling finishing college, raising her delightful three-year-old genius son Nathan, aka Natty Bumppo, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced parents. She's got enough complications without getting caught in the middle of a stick-up and falling in love with William Ashe, who willingly steps between the robber and her son.Shandi doesn't know that her blond god Thor has his own complications. When he looked down the barrel of that gun he believed it was destiny: It's been one year to the day since a tragic act of physics shattered his world. But William doesn't define destiny the way others do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in facts and numbers, destiny to him is about choice. Now, he and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head on, making choices that will reveal unexpected truths about love, life, and the world they think they know.

Someone Else's Love Story is beloved and highly acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson's funny, charming, and poignant novel about science and miracles, secrets and truths, faith and forgiveness; about falling in love, and learning that things aren't always what they seem--or what we hope they will be.

Shandi Pierce is juggling finishing college, raising her delightful three-year-old genius son Nathan, aka Natty Bumppo, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced parents. She's got enough complications without getting caught in the middle of a stick-up and falling in love with William Ashe, who willingly steps between the robber and her son.

Shandi doesn't know that her blond god Thor has his own complications. When he looked down the barrel of that gun he believed it was destiny: It's been one year to the day since a tragic act of physics shattered his world. But William doesn't define destiny the way others do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in facts and numbers, destiny to him is about choice. Now, he and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head on, making choices that will reveal unexpected truths about love, life, and the world they think they know.

'Brilliantly unnerving ... expertly crafted' Sunday Times, Thriller of the Month 'Jackson raises the stakes again and again' Guardian 'Finely paced, shrewdly observed ... Mother May I is a thinking (and feeling) reader's thriller' Wall Street Journal It's every mother's worst nightmare. 'If you ever want to see your baby again, GO HOME. Tell no one. Do not call the police. Do not call your husband. Be at your house by 5:15 PM. Or he's gone for good...' To get her son back alive, Bree must complete one small but critical task. It seems harmless enough, but this one action comes with a devastating price. And now Bree finds herself complicit in a terrible crime, caught up in a tangled web of secrets that threatens to destroy the perfect life she has built. Mother May I is a pulse-racing, heart-pounding thriller that will have you turning the pages in the race to save Bree's baby, and find the kidnapper. Praise for Joshilyn Jackson 'Jackson writes the kind of book that will set even the most blameless on edge, leaving us to wonder who might know our imperfect histories' Christina Dalcher 'A master of domestic suspense' Entertainment Weekly 'Wonderful - suspense and surprises, real characters and a scary, ominous backbeat' Lee Child

Laurel Hawthorne has worked hard to create a good life for her family, determined not to raise her daughter in the subdued, secretive household that she herself grew up in. And everything is just fine until the night she is awoken by a ghost in her bedroom; the ghost of 14-year-old neighbour Molly, whose body is now floating, face-down and lifeless in Laurel's swimming pool . . . The whole town thinks it was an accident, but Laurel knows in her bones that there is something more sinister afoot. And that's when her perfect world begins to crumble. With the help of her eccentric sister, Laurel sets off on a mission to investigate what really happened to the girl who stopped swimming. But along the way she starts to uncover the truth about her family, and just what did happen in the woods all those years ago - on a day she has managed to blank out, until now . . .

Every fifteen years, trouble comes after the Slocumb women. Now, as their youngest turns fifteen, a whole new kind of commotion is chasing all three generations. Mosey's desperate to know who used their yard as a make-shift cemetery, and why. The oldest, forty-five year old Ginny, fights to protect Mosey from the truth, a fight that could cost Ginny the love of her life. Between them is Liza, silenced by a stroke, with the answers trapped inside her. To survive Liza's secrets and Mosey's insistent adventures, Ginny must learn to trust the love that braids the strands of their past--and stop at nothing to defend their future.

A fiercely independent divorce lawyer learns the power of family and connection when she receives a cryptic message from her estranged mother in this bittersweet, witty novel from the nationally bestselling author of Someone Else's Love Story and gods in Alabama--an emotionally resonant tale about the endurance of love and the power of stories to shape and transform our lives.Born in Alabama, Paula Vauss spent the first decade of her life on the road with her free-spirited young mother, Kai, an itinerant storyteller who blended Hindu mythology with southern oral tradition to re-invent their history as they roved. But everything, including Paula's birth name Kali Jai, changed when she told a story of her own--one that landed Kai in prison and Paula in foster care. Separated, each holding secrets of her own, the intense bond they once shared was fractured.These days, Paula has reincarnated herself as a tough-as-nails divorce attorney with a successful practice in Atlanta. While she hasn't seen Kai in fifteen years, she's still making payments on that Karmic debt--until the day her last check is returned in the mail, along with a mysterious note: "I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. We will meet again, and there will be new stories. You know how Karma works."Then Kai's most treasured secret literally lands on Paula's doorstep, throwing her life into chaos and transforming her from only child to older sister. Desperate to find her mother before it's too late, Paula sets off on a journey of discovery that will take her back to the past and into the deepest recesses of her heart. With the help of her ex-lover Birdwine, an intrepid and emotionally volatile private eye who still carries a torch for her, this brilliant woman, an expert at wrecking families, now has to figure out how to put one back together--her own.The Opposite of Everyone is a story about story itself, how the tales we tell connect us, break us, and define us, and how the endings and beginnings we choose can destroy us . . . and make us whole. Laced with sharp humor and poignant insight, it is beloved New York Times bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson at her very best.

Nonny Frett understands the meaning of the phrase inbetween a rock and a hard place better than any womanalive. She's got two mothers, one deaf-blind and theother four baby steps from flat crazy. She's got twomen: a husband who's easing out the back door; and abest friend, who's laying siege to her heart in her frontyard. And she has two families: the Fretts, who stole herand raised her right; and the Crabtrees, who won't forgethow they were done wrong. Now, in Between, Georgia, a feud that began the night Nonny was bornis escalating and threatening to expose family secrets.Ironically, it might be just what the town needs...if onlyNonny weren't stuck in between.