A young woman tutors a rich thirteen-year-old girl, and their sessions together prompt the woman to reflect on her less-privileged teenage years and how she ended up with the job she has.

A nanny for newborns takes care of a mother with postpartum depression and her child. Against her own rules, she finds herself getting attached to the baby.

A pregnant narrator navigates her Chinese in-law’s opinions about America when they come to visit before she gives birth.

After one of her father's notebooks is recovered from an icecap, a woman recalls the love story between her mother, a rural woman who always wanted adventure, and her father, an adventurous explorer who disappeared on a voyage to the Arctic.

A man experiencing writers' block finds inspiration on a spontaneous trip to the home of near-strangers.

Shy but resolute, Martha Fiske meets the eccentric and detached soldier Tony Jones at a party and an intuitive friendship is born. Martha begins to fall for Tony, but as she yearns for permanence and commitment, he backs away from it.

A young woman with a green ribbon tied permanently around her neck protects the ribbon from the endless pawing of her husband. As they raise their son, the risk of the ribbon unraveling increases.

A book illustrator spends her free time being a house-sitter, imagining what her life might be like if she lived in their houses. When she goes to work for a certain publisher, the connection they find through their work deepens until the two fall in love, but she worries her satisfaction is fleeting.

In a patriarchal village threatened by demons, Asvi, a widow, takes the sacrificial place of a widowed mother who is too poor to evade becoming a female offering.