From the publisher: "Angela is single in New York City, stuck in a job she doesn’t want and a life that seems to have, somehow, just happened. She inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, but she never seems to have the time for it. Tacked to her office bulletin board is a photo from a magazine of a tidy cottage on the coast of Maine—a charming reminder of a life that could be hers, if she could only muster the courage to go after it. On a hope and a chance, Angela decides to pack it all up and move to Maine, finding the nudge she needs in the dating profile of a handsome sailor who loves dogs and Italian food. Angela begins to rebuild her life from the ground up. Working at a local coffeehouse, she begins to discover the pleasures and secrets of her new small-town community and, in the process, realizes there’s really no such thing as the way life should be."

From the publisher: "Though Australia has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years, the British government in the 1840s considers its fledgling colony uninhabited and unsettled, and views the natives as an unpleasant nuisance. In this gorgeous novel, Christina Baker Kline brilliantly recreates the beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land, telling the story of Australia from a fresh perspective, through the experiences of Evangeline, Hazel, and Mathinna. While life in Australia is punishing and often brutally unfair, it is also, for some, an opportunity: for redemption, for a new way of life, for unimagined freedom." Heads up: the producer of Big Little Lies has optioned Christina Baker Kline's latest for television.

The publisher calls this "an unforgettable story of friendship and second chances that highlights a little-known but historically significant movement in America's past." In Kline's bestselling novel, an unlikely friendship blossoms in the common ground of two women's rootless childhoods. Eighteen-year-old Molly is one mishap away from getting kicked out of foster care, even before she shortly ages out. Vivian is 91, a well-to-do widow who has lived a quiet life for many decades. But as a child, she was part of a failed social experiment: she was among the thousands of young orphans, many, like her, the children of immigrants, who were shipped west to find a home with midwestern families. This would fit the bill for an Immigrant Story category for a Reading Challenge. Everyone I know is reading this for book club.

From the author of Orphan Train. Publishers Weekly calls this "a taut, absorbing novel about a woman who must solve a haunting mystery in order to move on with her life."

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train. Publishers Weekly calls this "a powerful, immensely readable tale of loyalty and betrayal, family and memory, made fresh by Kline's often beautiful and always lucid prose." Add Audible narration for $6.99.

The author's working title (and desired title) for this work was Christina's World, named after the Andrew Wyeth painting so many of us fell in love with the first time we laid eyes on it. In this biographical novel, Kline upends the narrative, telling the story from the perspective of the portrait's subject, "middle-aged" spinster Christina Olson. This isn't a book that will make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. It IS probing, thought-provoking, and extremely discussable.