When the literal-minded Amelia Bedelia helps out at her doctor's office one busy day, nothing seems to go quite right until Amelia begins to treat the impatient patients.

Tucker Mills, Massachusetts, 1839. bound as an indentured servant to the Tucker Mills bank and its controlling manager, Reese Thackery finds comfort in her faith and her friends. She vows to serve her remaining two years with a willing heart. But that's before bank owner Conner Kingsley rides into town to audit the bank. Reese starts her work at the Kingsley manor but is haunted by memories of her past. When the bank manager becomes vengeful, Conner...

Amelia Bedelia shows her niece Effie Lou how to follow instructions to the letter as they dust the potato bugs and sew seeds.

Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings. "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is the story of 16-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius, even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil. An Independent Bestseller Winner of the 2000 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award! Tracy Chevalier...

At 14, Grace Reeves leaves home to work for her mother's former employers at Riverton House. She is the same age as Hannah, the headstrong middle child who visits her uncle, Lord Ashbury, at Riverton House with her siblings Emmeline and David. Fascinated, Grace observes their comings and goings and, as an invisible maid, is privy to the secrets she will spend a lifetime pretending to forget. But when a filmmaker working on a movie about the family...

Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they--and Grace--know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight...

A woman and her daughter emigrate from Mexico for a better life in America, where they start working for a family where the patriarch is a newly celebrated chef with an insecure wife.

Bhima, a domestic servant in the household of Sera Dubash, an upper-class Parsi housewife, develops a bond with her employer over the course of many years as they both suffer through abusive marriages, loss, and disappointments, but their friendship still cannot overcome the restrictions of class and money.

The novel begins on the eve of Paula's forty-eighth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Having outlived an abusive husband and father, Paula and her four children are now struggling to live their adult lives, with two of the kids balancing their own addictions. Paula rebuilds her life slowly. As she goes about her daily routine working as a cleaning woman, and cooking for her two children at home, she re-establishes connections...

Jane Re--a half-Korean, half-American orphan--takes a position as an au pair for two Brooklyn academics and their daughter, but a brief sojourn in Seoul, where she reconnects with family, causes her to wonder if the man she loves is really the man for her as she tries to find balance between two cultures.