During the Great Depression, rural Vermont suffers along with the rest of the country, and Henry Talcott, with only occasional work as a butcher, is reduced to moving into a tent on the edge of Black Pond with his two children. Their beautiful but unreliable mother has left them, and Henry is devastated by her desertion. He hasn’t told Thomas or Margaret why she left—or if she will return.

Told from twelve-year-old Thomas’s perspective, The Lost Mother follows this shattered family as a wealthy neighbor begins to woo the children as companions for her strange, housebound son, and Henry weighs an unexpected proposition, the consequences of which may cost him everything.

As 9-11 shakes the Doonesbury world, many of its denizens are drawn inexorably toward Ground Zero–Mike to attend a memorial service for a former employer; B.D., reactivated for crowd control and celebrity tourism; Marcia Feinbloom to hit on firefighters; and Zonker to deliver potent fruitcakes to weary rescue workers. Those on the home front are no less affected by events: “I no longer care what Madonna had for breakfast,” laments Boopsie, proof positive that Everything Has Changed.

Half a world away, in Al-Qaeda Qountry, a burka-clad Roland Hedley is captured by a freelance warlord, then wounded by a can of Spam during a massive friendly food drop. Feyzabad Station Chief Havoc’s effort to rescue the downed journalist speaks well for the new, improved CIA, which has somehow managed to parlay its “massive” intelligence failures into cult status on the nation’s campuses. How else to explain Jeff Redfern’s new internship with “Acme Imports”–and his sudden affinity for shaken-not-stirred libations?

It’s a chilling Christmas in Wyoming when an agent running for his life is taken in by a beautiful veterinarian in this suspenseful holiday romance.

A mole has framed undercover DEA agent Rogan McNally, and now his own agency and the drug cartel he infiltrated are after him. Hiding out in the mountains of Wyoming, he’ll need to keep ahead of his pursuers while surviving the harsh winter.

But when Rogan is wounded just as a snowstorm hits, he needs to take the nearest shelter he can find . . . a rural barn belonging to veterinarian Trina Lopez. Saving Rogan’s life puts Trina in the crosshairs. Now both of them are on the run—and in need of a Christmas miracle.

Ron Carlson’s short stories have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere, while his numerous collections have won critical acclaim. In this series of personal essays, Carlson explores his own process, inviting the reader to watch over his shoulder as he creates the short story “The Governor’s Ball.”

“This is the story of a story,” Carlson tells us. But as he crafts a tale, he also offers practical advice for writers, covering everything from the first glimmer of an idea to the final sentence. Carlson urges the writer to refuse the outside distractions—a second cup of coffee, a troll through the dictionary—and attend to the necessity of uncertainty, the pleasures of an unfolding story.

In the spring of 1919, his wife’s death brings Sergeant Jim Carver home from the front. He returns to be a single parent to his seven children in a place he has never lived: Number Twenty, Manor Park Avenue, in a South London suburb.

The Carvers’ neighbor Eunice Fraser, at Number Twenty-Two, has also known tragedy. Her soldier husband was killed, leaving her and her eight-year-old son, Esme, to fend for themselves.

At Number Four, Edith Clegg takes in lodgers and looks after her sister, Becky, whose mind has been shattered by a past trauma.

No one knows much about the Friths, at Number Seventeen, who moved to the Avenue before the war.

Brooke Adamson knew how devilishly handsome magnate, Rafe Charlwood felt about her. She was his wife after all—or rather she had been, until a terrible car accident three years ago, which Rafe still believed had claimed her life.

Now she’s returned, with a new face and identity, to claim her son. But even though she despises Rafe—almost as much as he hates the memory of the woman he married—resisting his sinful touch and devastating kiss proves more difficult than Brooke ever anticipated . . .