Kaye Gibbons, whose debut, Ellen Foster, was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, Divining Women is her first novel since 1999. Darker than Gibbons’ previous novels, Divining Women evolves into an almost gothic tale as the somewhat na•ve and unsuspecting young Mary Oliver heads south from Washington, D.C., to Elm City, North Carolina, in the autumn of 1918 to be a companion for her pregnant aunt, Maureen. Because the war has interrupted Mary’s plans to study abroad, her mother thinks this experience will enrich her. “These next months of your life will always be a blessing,” she says, unaware that her brother, Troop, is a pretentious, cruel man who has not only abused his wife emotionally, but subjected her to excruciating “cures” for her “melancholy.” As a bond of trust develops between niece and aunt, Maureen begins to awaken from her self-protective stupor and realize the full extent of Troop’s crimes against her. The tension mounts as Maureen’s confidence builds, Mary becomes more outspoken, and Troop, in reaction to the threat to his power, attempts to tighten his stranglehold over the women even further. In spite of being isolated, Mary and Maureen become connected to other female family members and friends through letters, and that connection, that safety net, that encouragement to grab onto life, so skillfully handled in Gibbons’ lyrical style, renders the tortuous experience a blessing after all. “This house is full of women,” Maureen says cryptically. “They come and go like nothing you have ever seen.” Linda Stankard writes from Nanuet, New York.

<B>A young widow’s triumphant journey through grief</B> During the first few months of Sophie Stanton’s life as a widow, she goes to work dressed in her bathrobe, finds herself sobbing in the produce section of her local grocery store and is crippled with fear by the pattern on her shower curtain. It is safe to say she is deep in mourning over her husband, Ethan, who died of cancer, leaving behind a 30-something wife with no idea how to move past such a loss and the deep loneliness it has left in its wake. "Now I understand why rock stars wreck hotel rooms," thinks Sophie as she stands alone in her kitchen, contemplating smashing every dish she owns. "To shatter the relentless stillness of a room." <B>Good Grief</B>, the truly extraordinary debut novel by journalist Lolly Winston, trails Sophie through the first year of her widowhood. But this novel is anything but textbook Grief Recovery 101. It’s different, because Winston has the nerve to admit that recovering from the death of a loved one is a ridiculous thing to have to do, and that it often has moments of humor mixed in with all the bad stuff. In <B>Good Grief</B>, we see Sophie through every messy stage, from denial to anger.

At first, she functions at the most primary level, sleeping for days and stuffing herself with Oreos until her mouth hurts. From there, Sophie moves on to bargaining with God. Maybe there was a clerical error, she thinks. Maybe the angel of death grabbed the wrong guy, and Ethan will be returned as soon as they straighten things out Upstairs. Finally realizing this isn’t going to happen, and determined to make a fresh start away from the ghosts of the home she shared with Ethan, Sophie trades her soulless cubicle job in Silicon Valley for a fresh start in Ashland, Oregon, home of Shakespearean festivals and hippies of all ages.

Once there, she rents an overpriced but charming house and sets about her new life, which at first consists mainly of occasional panic attacks and a job prepping vegetables at a tony local restaurant. She spends her days at work and her nights cuddling with Ethan’s old clothes.

But slowly, she settles into her new life. She takes on a teenage girl in desperate need of guidance and works her way up the chain of command at the restaurant. Then she meets a possibly too-good-to-be-true actor who just has to go ahead and complicate her purposefully simple existence.

<B>Good Grief</B> is strikingly original and stunningly brave in its honest portrayal of moving on, warts and all. Winston acknowledges that the real mourning process is not a Jackie Kennedy photo: a perfect, brave widow wearing a wrinkle-free outfit as she says a final farewell to her husband. The details may vary, but in real life, mourning is sloppy and filled with setbacks and anger, too many calories and too little sleep. And, yes, full of humor. Winston gives us such a lively gift of a character in Sophie, who, after her grief-stricken stupor starts to dissipate, turns out to be a touchingly normal person, alternately neurotic and strong. She worries that she’ll betray her dead husband if she sleeps with another man. She finds the nerve to open her own bakery without ever having run a business in her life. In short, she gathers her life back together in a way that is both triumphant and unforgettable.

Good Grief marks the arrival of an exciting and ambitious new voice. Winston’s story sparkles with wit and sympathy, but her musings on what it means to really live even in the shadow of death are the true reward here.

<I>Amy Scribner writes from Washington state.</I>

Some novels leave you wishing you knew people as cool as the characters. Who didn’t want to slip back in time to befriend the wise and witty Elizabeth Bennett after reading Pride and Prejudice? But best-selling author Laura Zigman’s new novel Her will more likely leave you thanking your lucky stars that you don’t know anyone quite like the neurotic bride-to-be Elise.

Her is a sharp, hilarious chronicle of the months leading up to Elise’s wedding. The invitations are ordered, the caterer booked. Elise and fiancŽ Donald are steadily, if not entirely blissfully, working up to the big day. Then Donald’s impossibly perfect ex, Adrienne, moves to town and Elise’s inner jealousy invades. Elise finds herself scrolling through Donald’s cell phone calls at 2 a.m. and cruising past Adrienne’s apartment to peer at the shadows inside.

Most of this is understandable. After all, it is her, the trust fund uber-woman in designer clothes. With a flashy museum job and a brilliant Yale professor father who studied Albert Einstein’s brain, Adrienne is a formidable presence. And she does seem intent on recapturing Donald, whom she so willingly gave up years ago. But there comes a point in the novel when Elise’s incessant obsession with this other woman creeps close to going over the top. Instead of jolting her back to her senses, Elise’s friends go along for the ride, literally. When Elise decides it’s time to find out why Donald has been visiting Adrienne, she doesn’t simply ask him. She enlists her best friend Gayle to slump with her in a car and spy on the pair. Elise represents what women everywhere hope they wouldn’t become if caught in her position, but what we suspect we’re capable of in the end. She isn’t the embodiment of grace under pressure, but she is honest, as is Zigman’s writing. Her is as addicting as Zigman’s previous work (Animal Husbandry, Dating Big Bird). The story is so lively and funny that even when you want to shred Elise’s $500 sweater, you can’t help but hope she and Donald live happily ever after. Amy Scribner is a writer in Washington, D.C.

Can miracles occur? Is it possible to see the invisible or touch the intangible? Elizabeth Egan has never believed so. This 30-something single woman is an interior designer living in a small Irish town that she has always hated. Despite the fact that she loves to give things a good makeover, she hasn’t been able to rearrange her mundane life by filling it with color, laughter or adventure. She’s never tried because adding these qualities to her life could make her lose control. This organized woman deals only with facts and reality because dreams and wishes, hope and love, frivolity and spontaneity have only brought her heartache. They have caused each of her family members to fly out of her life in different directions, leaving her solely responsible for a six-year-old nephew even though she vowed never to have children.

Is there a reason for everything? Ivan certainly believes so. That’s natural, given that he’s an imaginary friend, only seen by children who need him. His work becomes more complicated the day he enters the life of Elizabeth’s nephew, Luke. Luke isn’t the problem. It’s Elizabeth. Not only can she sense his presence, she is also able to see him. And he is drawn to her in a way he can’t explain. Ivan can hear the pain and loneliness in her silence, so, like any good friend, he tries to show Elizabeth a way to be happy. But before she can accept his gift, she’s got to believe.

Cecelia Ahern, the daughter of Ireland’s prime minister, has written a romantic, whimsical and beautiful third novel. Her characters are warm and embraceable. If You Could See Me Now illustrates what can happen when we see with more than our eyes. Tanya S. Hodges writes from Nashville.

Honora Beecher collects sea glass off the coast of New Hampshire. Fragments of clear, blue and green bottles boat trash, she thinks to herself find their way to the sandy beach where Honora is making a life with her new husband Sexton Beecher. It’s the late 1920s, and they are buying into the American dream as deeply as they know how. He is a typewriter salesman. She works full-time to make their scruffy fixer-upper a home, while waiting, hopefully, to get pregnant.

Anita Shreve’s latest novel, Sea Glass, starts out in these idyllic terms. Loving husband, hard-working couple, a first home, a satisfying hobby. It’s a world infused with gadgets from the past, like a copiograph machine, the precursor of the photocopier, and with the habits of the past like making all your own dresses.

Sea Glass might, on the most superficial inspection, seem to be another one of those historical romances that view the past, especially the ’20s and ’50s, as the “wonder years,” a safer and more innocent time than the one we live in now. But Shreve’s novel steers well clear of that shoal. Instead, this intriguing novelist seems bent on showing us that the 1920s were just as scary and unpredictable as our own times. The headlines Honora reads every morning suggest a world just as close to spinning out of control as the one most readers are familiar with today. Dozens die over the Fourth of July weekend, many in fireworks accidents. Others drown or crash their cars. With no warning, a ship explodes in the harbor, killing half a town. Soon the fragile harmony of the Beechers’ perfect lives, seemingly unflawed by the kind of moral turbulence we experience in the 21st century, is blown apart by the stock market crash and a subsequent union strike.

The singular accomplishment of Shreve’s book is that she is able to capture a time gone by in authentic and believable detail without making her characters cute, quaint or unrealistically virtuous the hubris of the average historical romance writer. In the world of Sea Glass, people live together without getting married, cheat on their employers and think about having extramarital affairs, just as characters in a contemporary novel would.

Some readers may find the character of Sexton Beecher the most believable. Just as Shreve refuses to romanticize the past, she also refuses to put the 1920s American family man on a pedestal. Beecher is driven by a vast, unfocused hunger which, if viewed from the right angle, might appear to be the dark side of that American dream we talk so much about. Sexton is good with people, a look-you-straight-in-the-eye kind of guy, and he has no problem doling out the little lies that make up business relationships. He longs for his own home, and he’ll do some creative financing to get it. He loves his wife, but when they’re apart and he’s lonely, he’s not opposed to a little recreation with another woman. And yet, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that many readers will not despise Sexton; they will understand his hunger. Like that other famous traveling salesman, Willie Loman, Sexton makes the reader ache for his failure at the same time that he (the reader) clearly perceives the character’s many errors of judgment.

Just as sea glass offers hints of a lost era, so Shreve’s new novel is a perfect fragment of our past a fictional story, but one so true to human psychology and the mores of the times, the reader may feel it contains more truth than a diary or a newspaper archive.

Child abuse and its aftermath permeated Trezza Azzopardi’s debut novel, The Hiding Place, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize. In her disturbing and mesmerizing second novel, Remember Me, she utilizes the sad, lonely life of one woman to explore some of the underlying causes of homelessness.

The novel’s opening finds 72-year-old Winnie Foy living in an abandoned shoe repair shop in a small English village. She has just been burglarized her wig and her satchel with all her belongings stolen by a young girl who vanishes into the night. As Winnie recalls what keepsakes are now lost to her, perhaps forever, she steps back in time, forced to remember years of long-buried hardship and mistreatment beginning in the 1930s, when Winnie grew up as Patsy Richards, a girl called “simple” by the townsfolk. Her mentally ill mother dies when Patsy is seven; she goes to live with her grandfather, who calls her Lillian, and her father visits once a week. With the approach of war, many children are removed to the country for safety, and young Lillian is sent to live with her aunt. Her father doesn’t come to say goodbye, but Lillian sees his suit hanging in the pawnbroker’s window, so she waves goodbye to that instead.

After several years of living with her aunt and “not a single other person . . . no one to call me by name,” Lillian falls in love at 15 with a local boy, who calls her Beauty. They plan to run away together, but when she becomes pregnant, he disappears, and her aunt sends her away. Lillian is taken in by Bernard and Jean Foy, a clairvoyant and his sister, who find commercial potential in Lillian’s ability to “see things.” She remembers being afraid. “I had no money, I was pregnant. All I had was a head full of buzzing sounds I couldn’t make sense of. No one wanted me, my father never came.” But the Foys wanted her; this is why she thinks she became so “bendable,” allowing them to do whatever they wanted, including changing her name to Winnifred and tricking her into having an abortion.

Winnie decides to leave the Foys, then learns that her grandfather has died in the war. She finds lodging in a boarding house, but is soon discovered there by Jean Foy, who accuses Winnie of stealing from her, and drops her off at a home for thieves, the mentally ill, and women of “ill repute.” There, Winnie has no visitors and is treated as an object, not a person, for more than 20 years; she is finally released when she is forty. In her search for the few items providing links to her past, Winnie remembers more and more of the intervening years, including her attempt at kidnapping a child to replace the one removed from her against her will. Memories of being alone, used and rejected slowly pour around her. Azzopardi reveals her poignant litany of rejection a little at a time, like a time-release capsule, until the portrait of Winnie’s life gradually comes into focus. Her style of writing in erratically juxtaposed blocks of time can be a challenge, but the compassionate character study which emerges is well worth the effort. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Cecelia Ahern, the 22-year-old daughter of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, writes with insight beyond her years in her debut novel, P.S. I Love You, a book at once poignant and comical, introspective and farcical.

Holly Kennedy, 29, has just become a widow when the novel opens, her husband Gerry her best friend, lover and soul mate having succumbed to a brain tumor. Holly slogs through aimless days and nights with only memories to keep her afloat until her mother reminds her of an envelope she received in the mail just before Gerry’s death. The notes inside are labeled with the remaining months of the year, March through December, and each one contains a tip, written by Gerry as he was dying, to help Holly get on with her life. The first instructs her to go shopping for a new outfit, which gets her out of her dirty jeans and Gerry’s T-shirts; July’s note sends her on a vacation to Spain for a week with her two best friends, September pushes her to get out and look for her "best job ever," and December, the last note, encourages Holly not to be afraid to love again.

Gradually, Holly emerges from her cocoon. Armed with a new job in charge of advertising for a trendy magazine, she is constantly buoyed by her long-time friends, who serve as the vehicles for Ahern’s comic side. They drag Holly along to "hen parties," shopping trips and balls against her wishes. Side plots focus on Holly’s family, who include her doting parents, a stodgy older brother who emerges as one of her staunchest supporters, and her younger sister, pink-haired and flaky, who can always make Holly laugh.

Ahern weaves just the right amount of humor into her tale of Holly’s struggle with grief and its aftermath, resulting in a highly engaging addition (for which the movie rights have already been sold) to the "plight of the suddenly single" genre.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Some authors seem to click with moviemakers, and writer Nicholas Sparks is one of the lucky few making his way to the top of Holly- wood’s A-list. First came Message in a Bottle, Sparks’ novel about a tragic love letter which was turned into a hit movie starring Kevin Costner, Robin Wright and Paul Newman. Next comes the film version of A Walk to Remember, which opens in theaters January 25.

In fact, all five of Sparks’ best-selling romantic novels appear headed for the screen. His first book, the multi-million-seller The Notebook, is now in the screenwriting stage, and negotiations are under way to sell film and television rights to his other two novels, A Bend in the Road and The Rescue.

The boyish author and father of five, who just a few years ago was making a living as a pharmaceutical salesman, says his success in the jaded world of Tinseltown hasn’t really changed the way he writes or the way he lives.

"You just set out to write the best book you possibly can, and if you’re lucky Hollywood will make a film of it. The odds are very small. They just don’t make that many films based on books," Sparks said from his home in North Carolina, where he was recuperating from the rigors of a European book tour.

"Movies are a nice way to introduce people to your work, especially if the film is done well, and I’ve been fortunate in that both these films have been done very well." A Walk to Remember, which should have special appeal to the teen audience, stars pop singer and MTV regular Mandy Moore as a small-town preacher’s daughter who wins the heart of a skeptical rich kid. Much of the filming took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, not far from Sparks’ home in New Bern.

"My oldest son and I went to the set twice, and I went down with my editor a third time," Sparks said, noting that he enjoyed his trips to the set but didn’t write the screenplay or take an active role in making the film.

It might be understandable if Sparks took a special interest in the casting of Mandy Moore as Jamie, since the character was inspired in part by his own sister, Danielle, who died in May after battling cancer.

"Mandy Moore was great on both a personal and professional level. She’s a very charming and intelligent young lady, and she did a fabulous job in front of the camera. She really gave a superb performance, especially considering this was her first major film role," Sparks said. Also appearing in the film are Shane West as the male lead (Landon Carter), and Peter Coyote and Daryl Hannah as parents of the teens. Sparks’ publisher, Warner Books, is releasing a special movie tie-in version of A Walk to Remember to coincide with the film’s release.

A disciplined writer who isn’t content to rest on his laurels, Sparks has already completed his sixth novel, The Guardian, a tale of "love and danger" to be published next fall. He is also finishing a screenplay of The Guardian, outlining his seventh and eighth books and helping to design a new Web site.

Sparks does all his work in a home office "right off the living room with five kids running around." His children range in age from 10-year-old Miles to five-month-old twin daughters, and this busy father admits to shutting his office door "at times when it gets tough."

In her engaging second novel, Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada) follows the trials and tribulations of another young woman who secures a dream job, only to find that it’s not what she was expecting. New Yorker Bette Robinson’s relatively staid life working in banking changes drastically when she gets a new job at a PR firm. Soon, she is frequenting Manhattan’s hottest clubs and making the acquaintances of pop culture’s finest. When one night of revelry results in a chance meeting with British hottie Philip Weston, Bette becomes the most popular employee at her firm. Gossip columnists and paparazzi follow every move Bette and Philip make, and Bette’s boss is thrilled at the resulting publicity. But Bette isn’t so sure that her relationship with Philip is any more substantial than their nights of photo ops. Bette’s chance meeting with bouncer and up-and-coming chef Sammy Stevens results in a budding romance, though Bette isn’t quite sure that Sammy measures up to her ideal man, the hero of her favorite romance novel. Despite Bette’s relationship woes, the most captivating aspect of her character is her warring conscience, which wonders whether catering to the rich and famous is a particularly worthy life goal. On top of that, Bette must cope with the fractured relationship with best friend Penelope and frequent arguments with her parents, aging hippies who believe that Bette should be employed in a more productive venue. Much as she did in The Devil Wears Prada, Weisberger provides a bird’s-eye view of a world few inhabit while poking fun at the ridiculous behavior of some of the celebrities and their associates. Readers will likely be both intrigued and appalled by this humorous look into the lives of the rich and famous.