Real estate agent Maggie Fortenberry works at Red Mountain Reality, that has been going downhill since the death of its founder, comes up with a plan to save the business. The rival of their company Babs is unscrupulous real estate agent who hates Maggie and is determined to put her out of business.

In a summer that refuses to end, in the deceiving warmth of earliest October, civil war has come to Green Town, Illinois. It is the age-old conflict: the young against the elderly, for control of the clock that ticks their lives ever forward. The first cap-pistol shot heard 'round the town is dead accurate, felling an old man in his tracks, compelling town elder and school board despot Mr. Calvin C. Quartermain to marshal his graying forces and declare...

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and to the characters that captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of readers in his beloved best sellers Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool"--

Two roads lead to Mount Hope. None leads out. There's no place to run in a community that's been taken and is being intentionally kept off the grid. A small southern town was evacuated after a freak power-plant accident. As the first anniversary of the mishap approaches, some residents are allowed to return past the national guard roadblocks. Mount Hope natives Maggie and Jordan quickly discover that their hometown is not as it was before. Downed...

Under a new government program based on the saying "It takes a village to raise a child," the Baudelaire orphans are adopted by an entire town, with disastrous results.

One by one, a number of people of varying ages and backgrounds transform a trash-filled inner-city lot into a productive and beautiful garden, and in doing so, the gardeners are themselves transformed.

A boy, a dog, and an old man are lonely before the boy plans a rally, the dog looks for a boy, and all the townspeople run to the old man's aid when lightning strikes his home and something miraculous happens.