Rachel Keats and Jack McGill were artists, deeply in love when they married, until the rush of life took its toll and they divorced. Six years later, Jack puts aside his career as a leading architect to hold a bedside vigil at his ex-wife's hospital bed. Jack begins to see Rachel, his daughters, and the story of his marriage with new eyes. Coast Road celebrates those things in life that matter most - the companionship of friends and the irreplaceable time spent with children and family.

The Maxwells and the Popes have been friends forever. The women were college roommates, their husbands are partners in the same law firm, their kids have grown up next door to each other, and the two families share both vacations and holidays.

One phone call is all it takes to lure real estate photographer Mallory Aldiss back to her family Rhode Island beach home. It's been 20 years since she's been gone - running from the scandal that destroyed her parents' marriage, drove her and her two sisters apart, and crushed her relationship with her first love. But going home is fraught with emotional baggage - memories, mysteries, and secrets abound. Mal's 13-year-old daughter, Joy, has never been to the place where Mal's life was shaped and is desperate to go.

Julia Bechtel's life seems to have reached a dead end. Her daughter, 21, is off on her own. Her husband has grown more and more distant, more and more domineering, and the result has been a further diminishing of Julia's feeling of self-worth. In an effort to buy some time and to try to figure some things out, Julia visits her daughter who has taken a summer job off the coat of Maine. When Julia misses the last ferry boat from the mainland, she catches a lobster boat that carries passengers to the island.

When Natalie Seebring announces plans to marry within months of the death of her husband of fifty-eight years, her son and daughter are stunned. In the face of their disapproval, Natalie decides it's time to talk about the past and reveal the secrets she has kept for decades. She hires Olivia Jones to help write her memoir and invites her to spend the summer at the family vineyard. As summer deepens and the vineyard's crop ripens, Natalie's story unfolds and startles one family member after another....

After the death of her adoptive mother, Chelsea Kane is a woman consumed by a need to discover her natural heritage. She arrives in the New Hampshire town where she was born, aching for answers. It is while she is looking for them that she finds something quite unexpected: a love she thought she would never know.

After an unscrupulous reporter falsely accuses Boston lounge singer Lily Blake of having an affair with a newly appointed Cardinal, she’s hounded by the press, fired from her job, and robbed of all her public freedom. The humiliation and violation of privacy leaves her no choice but to retreat to her rural hometown of Lake Henry, New Hampshire. In search of refuge, Lily forms an uneasy alliance with John Kipling, a former Boston reporter with trust issues of his own.

In the idyllic small town of Tucker, Vermont, life flows at a rhythmic pace for pediatrician Paige Pfeiffer. But when Mara O'Neill, her best friend and medical partner, inexplicably kills herself, Paige's comfortable world is suddenly shattered. Temporarily caring for Mara's newly adopted baby daughter while she comes to grips with her grief, Paige clings to the hope that, in time, her orderly life will return.

What if wishes really could come true? It’s the question facing waitress Bree Walker when she awakens in the hospital following a blizzard in sleepy Panama, Vermont. While she can’t recall the near-tragedy that landed her there, she’s overcome with the certainty that she has been granted three wishes. One seems to have come true already: At her side is renowned author Tom Gates, the accident’s only witness, who came to Panama to make sense of his fame - and who now makes Bree his cause.

Emily Aulenbach is 30, a lawyer married to a lawyer, working in Manhattan. An idealist, she had once dreamed of representing victims of corporate abuse, but she spends her days in a cubicle talking on the phone with vic­tims of tainted bottled water - and she is on the bottler’s side. And it isn’t only work. It’s her sister, her friends, even her husband, Tim, with whom she doesn’t connect the way she used to. She doesn’t connect to much in her life, period, with the exception of three things - her computer, her BlackBerry, and her watch....

Mackenzie Cooper took her eyes off the road for just a moment, but the resulting collision was enough to rob her not only of her beloved daughter but ultimately of her marriage, family, and friends - and thanks to the nonstop media coverage, even her privacy. Now, she lives in Vermont under the name Maggie Reid. Her only goal is to stay under the radar and make it through her remaining probation. But she isn’t the only one in this peaceful town with secrets.

Writer Sabrina Stone had married wealthily and unwisely. Her husband's refusal to love their handicapped son added more strain to an already failing relationship. Yet Sabrina feels a commitment to her marriage - one that she has vowed to honor. Then one day, she encounters an investigative reporter named Derek McGill....

"In many respects, it is my first mainstream novel.

Here is the story of three families: the Warrens and the Whytes, wealthy, powerful, and connected by the marriage of Deborah Warren and Mark Whyte; and the not-so-wealthy Morells - Cassie, the loyal housekeeper for the Warrens, and her daughter, Katia, who grew up with and adores the Warren and Whyte children."

Charlotte and Nicole were once the best of friends, spending summers together in Nicole's family's island house, but they have since grown apart. When Nicole returns to the island house in order to write a book about island food, she invites her old friend. Outgoing and passionate, Charlotte has a gift for talking to people and making friends, and Nicole would like her help interviewing locals for her book. But what both women don't know is that they are each holding a secret that may change their relationship forever.

For Annie Barnes, going home to Middle River means dealing with truths long hidden. But it is a journey she knows she must take if she is to put to rest, once and for all, her misgivings about her mother's recent death. To an outsider, Middle River is a picture-perfect New Hampshire town. But Annie grew up there, and she knows all its secrets - just like her idol, Grace Metalious, author of the infamous novel Peyton Place, which laid a small town's sexual secrets bare for all the world to see.