Louisa and Clem: two sisters who love each other more the further they move apart. Louisa is the elder one, the conscientious student, precise and careful, who yearns for a good marriage, a career, a family. Clem, the archetypal younger sibling, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her.

Louisa and Clem: two sisters who love each other more the further they move apart. Louisa settles in New York while Clem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands in the Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is 'like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching'.

Greenie Duquette lavishes most of her energy on her Greenwich Village bakery. It is at Walter's restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico wooes her away from the city to be his chef. This work is a human tale of longing and loss, folly and forgiveness, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important connections to others.

Paul McLeod, patriarch of a Scottish family and a retired newspaper editor, is on a package tour after the death of his wife. The story of his departure from the family home in Scotland and late gesture towards some sort of freedom gives way to his eldest son's life. This a novel about how we live and how family ties can offer redemption and joy.

Greenie is the fiery proprietor of her own Greenwich Village pastry business. When Greenie's signature coconut cake is served to the governor of New Mexico, he invites her to be his personal chef; impulsively she accepts. And, when she heads west with her four-year-old son but without her husband, she sets in motion a period of adventure.