The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. 1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University...

Pushing away her devoted husband, a once-successful writer moves back into her bohemian childhood home, where she struggles to come to terms with the mental illness that has overshadowed her life.

While breaking the hottest news story of the year, broadcast journalist Isabel Murphy falls apart on live television in front of an audience of millions. She lands at Three Breezes, a four-star psychiatric hospital nicknamed the "nut hut," where she begins the painful process of recovering the life everyone thought she had. But accepting her place among her fellow patients proves difficult, and Isabel struggles to reconcile the fact that she is,...

The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries...

"With fierce intelligence and emotional intensity, Alice Sebold brings us a searing portrait of a mother-daughter bond that descends into murder. Clair and Helen Knightly are a parent and child locked in a relationship so unrelenting that they have become the center of each other's worlds. But as this novel opens, Helen crosses a boundary she never thought she would approach. And while her act is almost unconscious, it somehow seems like the fulfillment...

Gospel singer Charmaine Hopewell has been searching for her mother since she was 11 years old, abandoned, and thrown into the foster care system. Now she is married to Harlan Hopewell, a beloved televangelist who has risen to popularity due to his disdain for psychology and psychiatry. Charmaine, despite their loving relationship, hides her own depression and search for meaning. Upon finding her mother in a mental institution, Charmaine realizes she...

Izzy's eccentric, complicated mother committed suicide on her forty-first birthday. Now, on the night before Izzy herself is to turn forty-one, she struggles with the realization that she will be older than her mother ever was. And to make matters worse, her widowed father, unstable sister Ellie, and precocious niece have decided to accompany her to Colorado for what promises to be an emotionally charged weekend. As Izzy is flooded with memories...