An Avon flare book

Set on the cusp of the country's great social movements - youth, women's, peace, and civil rights - in the year before the love turned to anger and the peace to militancy, Downtown is the story of Smoky O'Donnell, her career and her heart. When Smoky arrives in Atlanta in 1966, after an airless lifetime back in Savannah, she is at once thrilled and chastened by this dazzling, hectic young city on the move. Atlanta is one of the first cities to have its own magazine, called Downtown, for which Smoky has been specially chosen to work as a writer. In her heart she knows it is a job that will change her life. With breathtaking quickness it introduces her to many unforgettable people - not least among them the magazine's flamboyant and utterly charismatic editor, Matthew Comfort, who helps shape many careers, including hers. Smoky soon meets Bradley Hunt III, the charming and substantial scion of an aristocratic Southern family who invites her into a world more polished and remote than any she has known. As spring comes to Atlanta, she finds herself in the company of Lucas Geary, a gifted young photographer with a rebel's heart. Through the summer, their work takes them deep into the hot, restless streets, and he shows her another world she's never seen - a world populated by shuffling hopelessness, where she meets John Howard, an enigmatic young black man who is a lawyer, freedom fighter, and hero in the civil rights movement, standing at a great moral crossroads. The choices Smoky must face, and her ultimate decisions, create a tender, joyous, and powerful story of the end of innocence - both Smoky's and America's - at a time when traditional values are in question and the air is full of possibility. Full of the masterful characterizations, probing insight, and lyrical prose for which Anne Rivers Siddons is justly acclaimed, Downtown is another stunning achievement from an extraordinary writer.

Having felt deprived all her life of schooling, friends, mother, and even her name by her twin sister, Louise finally begins to find her identity.

As the only passenger, and the only female, on a transatlantic voyage in 1832, thirteen-year-old Charlotte finds herself caught between a murderous captain and a mutinous crew.

When Annie discovers she's pregnant by her boyfriend, she's devastated. She has never felt so alone. With no one she can talk to, she pours her heart out to her diary, confiding her feelings of panic, self-doubt, and the desperate hope that some day she can turn her life around. She decides she wants to keep her baby and dreams of loving and caring for this little person. But after the baby is born, it's in her diary that she faces the agonizing question: Can she really raise this child on her own