Mona Simpson

Miles Adler-Hart starts eavesdropping to find out what his mother is planning for his life. When he learns instead that his parents are separating, his investigation deepens and he enlists his best friend, Hector, to help. Their amateur detective work starts innocently but quickly takes them to the far reaches of adult privacy as they acquire knowledge that will affect the family's well-being, prosperity and sanity. Burdened with this powerful information,...

"The story of a family whose single mom, fighting mental illness, slowly becomes unable to raise her family, told from the perspective of each of the three children. As the novel opens, a mother drives her eldest son Walter from their home in Los Angeles to the University of California at Berkeley. It will be her last fully responsible act before breaking down completely and being committed to a mental hospital, leaving her children behind. Holding...

Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to LA so her husband can follow his passion for writing television comedy. Suddenly the marriage -once a genuine 50/50 arrangement - changes, with Paul working long hours and Claire left at home with a baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for. Lola, a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who is working in America to pay for her own children's higher education back in the Philippines, becomes...

An unwed mother decides it's time for the father to look after his daughter and sends her to him. The father, a Silicon Valley tycoon with a girlfriend, gives the daughter and the mother a bungalow. The novel traces the daughter's influence on the tycoon.

Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time.