"Det. Maggie Kennedy-O'Keefe of the Grotto, Iowa, PD is assigned to a cold case, the murder of her 16-year-old best friend, Eve Knox, after two kids find a new piece of evidence, Eve's boot, in the cave where Maggie found Eve's body 25 years earlier."--

Hailed as "incandescent," "magnificent," and "a literary miracle" (Entertainment Weekly), hundreds of thousands of readers were enthralled by Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Now Robinson returns with a brilliantly imagined retelling of the prodigal son parable, set at the same moment and in the same Iowa town as Gilead. The Reverend Boughton's hell-raising son, Jack, has come home after twenty years away. Artful and devious in his youth, now an alcoholic...

"In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a social circle of lovers and friends navigate tangled webs of connection as they try to figure out what they want, and who they are."--

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, a kind of last testament to his remarkable forebears.

When tragedy strikes, forcing them down separate paths in 1967 Iowa, former nursing school roommates, against all odds, form a decades-long friendship that sees them through life's trials and tribulations until one snowy night leads their relationship to the ultimate crossroads. 1967: BettyKay has risked her family's disapproval to pursue her dreams away from her small town. Kitty has always relied on her beauty and smarts to get by and to hide a...

"Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist--even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory. All she wants...

Veteran social worker Ellen Moore is a fiercely dedicated children's advocate and a devoted mother and wife. But one blistering summer day, a simple moment of distraction will have repercussions that Ellen could never have imagined, threatening to shatter everything she holds dear, and trapping her between the gears of the system she works for. Meanwhile, ten-year-old Jenny Briard suddenly finds herself on her own, forced to survive with nothing but...

Austin Szerba narrates the end of humanity as he and his best friend Robby accidentally unleash an army of giant, unstoppable bugs and uncover the secrets of a decades-old experiment gone terribly wrong.

The Amazing Arden is the most famous female illusionist of her day, renowned for her notorious trick of sawing a man in half on stage. One night in Waterloo, Iowa, with young policeman Virgil Holt watching from the audience, she swaps her trademark saw for a fire ax. Is it a new version of the illusion, or an all-too-real murder? When Arden's husband is found lifeless beneath the stage later that night, the answer seems clear. But when Virgil happens...

Amalie heads to a pacifist community in Amana, Iowa, during the Civil War to unite with her fiance, Friedrich, but after learning that he has left to fight in the war, she tries to find comfort with his best friend, Matthias.