"Fall 2016 Library Journal Editors' Pick "In my reckless and undiscouraged youth," Lillian Boxfish writes, "I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street ..." She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, "in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it." Now it's the last night...

"An extraordinary friendship. A lifetime of stories that begins at the end . . . Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson lives on the Terminal Ward at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. Though the teenager has been told she's dying, she still has plenty of living to do. Joining the hospital's arts and crafts class, she meets the magnificent Margot, an 83-year-old, purple-pajama-wearing, fruitcake-eating rebel, who transforms Lenni in ways she never...

"The Good House tells the story of Hildy Good, who lives in a small town on Boston's North Shore. Hildy is a successful real-estate broker, good neighbor, mother, and grandmother. She's also a raging alcoholic. Hildy's family held an intervention for her about a year before this story takes place--"if they invite you over for dinner, and it's not a major holiday, " she advises "run for your life"--and now she feels lonely and unjustly persecuted....

Margaret Hughes, a septuagenarian living in Seattle, takes in a series of boarders who help her cope with her illness, and whose lives become unexpectedly connected to each other.

Newly independent widow Emily Maxwell dreams of visits by grandchildren and mourns changes in her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood before realizing an inner strength to pursue developing opportunities.

"The story of a stubborn Southern matron and her patient chauffeur, two very different individuals who, after a bumpy beginning, forge a lasting friendship that spans 25 years"--Container.

The Elm Creek Quilters have begun a round robin--a quilt created by sewing concentric patchwork to a central block as it is passed around a circle of friends. Led by Sarah McClure, who came to Waterford, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Matt, a few years ago, the project is to be their gift to their beloved fellow quilter Sylvia Compson. But like the most delicate cross-stitch, their lives are held together by the most tenuous threads of happiness--and...

Eighty-three-year-old Etta has never seen the ocean. So early one morning she takes a rifle, some chocolate, and her best boots and begins walking the 3,232 kilometers from rural Saskatchewan, Canada eastward to the sea. As Etta walks further toward the crashing waves, the lines among memory, illusion, and reality blur. Otto wakes to a note left on the kitchen table. "I will try to remember to come back," Etta writes to her husband. Otto has seen...

"A sweet, naive young woman trying to make it on her own in New York City, Frances doesn't think twice about returning the handbag she finds on the subway to its rightful owner. That owner is an eccentric French piano teacher with a love for classical music and an aching loneliness. The two become fast friends, but the older woman's maternal charms begin to dissolve and grow increasingly disturbing as Frances discovers that nothing is what it seems...

A 110-year-old black woman reminisces about her life, which has stretched from the days of slavery to the black militancy and civil rights movements of the 1960s.