After the death of her beloved grandfather, nineteen-year-old Maya Vidal, turning to drugs, alcohol, and petty crimes, becomes trapped in a war between assassins, the police, the FBI, and Interpol, until her grandmother helps her escape to the remote island of Chiloé, off coast of Chile where she tries to make sense of her life. Maya, a young American on the run records in her diary her adjustment to a new country, her drug problems, her romantic...

Twelve-year-old Claire struggles to cope while her eighteen-year-old brother, Andy, is treated for drug addiction and her family prepares to sell her beloved horses, but finally accepts that change can be good.

"When a car crash sidelines Mickey just before softball season, she has to find a way to hold on to her spot as the catcher for a team expected to make a historic tournament run. Behind the plate is the only place she's ever felt comfortable, and the painkillers she's been prescribed can help her get there. The pills do more than take away pain; they make her feel good. With a new circle of friends--fellow injured athletes, others with just time...

Returning to Los Angeles from his Eastern college for a Christmas vacation in the early 1980s, Clay "reenters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine ... A raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation."--Back cover, Vintage Contemporaries ed. (1998).

"Maren Walker dreams of finding her own little door. The doors have appeared to the people in her mountain town for as long as anyone can remember, though no one knows where they lead. Maren's mother was the last to go through, leaving nine-year-old Maren behind. Now living with her grandmother, Maren deals prescription medication to pay their bills and nurture her dream of becoming a nurse. When she faces the possibility of escaping her struggles...

"Tuck is slow to understand the circumstances that have driven her family to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, the former home of her deceased grandmother where she once spent her childhood summers. Squatting there now, she must care for her spirited young daughter and scrape together enough money to leave before winter arrives--or before they are found out. Relying on the island for sustenance and answers--bladderwrack, rosehips, tenacious...

"As a fussy baby, Anne de Bourgh's doctor prescribed laudanum to quiet her, and now the young woman must take the opium-heavy tincture every day. Growing up sheltered and confined, removed from sunshine and fresh air, the pale and overly slender Anne grew up with few companions except her cousins, including Fitzwilliam Darcy. Throughout their childhoods, it was understood that Darcy and Anne would marry and combine their vast estates of Pemberley...

"Erin and her friends from college, now in their mid-twenties, are shaken by the death of Silas, one of their own. They are plunged into a waking nightmare when they take a pill Silas learned of that allows them to see-and interact with-ghosts"-- When Erin's charismatic but reckless college ex-boyfriend, Silas, asks her to bail him out of rehab-- again-- she knows she needs to cut him off. Only days after he gets out, Silas turns up dead of an overdose...

When teenagers Mia and Sophie take ecstasy at a party, Mia falls heavily into drug culture while Sophie is sexually assaulted and attempts to hide it from the authorities.

"Paul Walden is not an alpha lobster, the hypermasculine crustacean king who intimidates the other male lobsters, beds all the lady lobsters, and wins at life. At least not according to the ego-bursting feedback he's given in his freshman seminar. But Paul finds a funny, faithful friend in Roby Smalls, and maybe; oh god, please; he's beginning to catch the interest of smart, beautiful Natalia Gutierrez. Cruising through high school as a sauced-out,...