A beloved and very sleepy little boy resists his mother's efforts to put him to bed.

Entering the afterlife due to a hit and run accident, a successful author learns she can observe the earthly lives of her nearly grown children and is also permitted three "nudges" to alter the outcome of events. Vivian Howe, author of thirteen beach novels and mother of three nearly grown children, is killed in a hit-and-run car accident while jogging near her home on Nantucket. In the Beyond, she's assigned to a Person named Martha, who allows...

Nancy Harmon fled her California home, the macabre deaths of her two children, and the hideous charges brought against her. She changed her name, dyed her hair and sought refuge in the serenity of a small New England town. Now, remarried with two new lovely children, Nancy's life is filled with happiness...until the morning when she looks for her children but all she finds is one tattered red mitten and knows that the nightmare is beginning again....

Seven years after her three-year-old daughter has vanished, Jennifer Blake receives a telephone call saying the girl may be found living with a family on Vancouver Island.

When Mrs. Bear and little Sam deliver the cakes they have made for their friends in the neighborhood, Sam carries the cakes all by himself, through the snow and up to the front doors.

Animal mommies lovingly kiss their animal babies.

Illustrations and prose inspired by the Quran celebrate a mother's love and hopes for her child.

Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful--and attempts a nail-biting escape.

An immigrant youth struggling to assimilate, a middle-aged housewife with a troubled marriage, a Vegas social worker, and a wounded soldier connect with each other and rescue themselves in the wake of an unthinkable incident.