self-actualization (psychology) in women

"The story of two girls and the feral year that will cost one her life, and define the other's for decades..."--Front flap.

"Constance Harding's comfortable corner of Surrey is her own little piece of heaven. She lives in a chocolate box house complete with an Aga and a parrot, her bell-ringing club is set to dominate the intercounty tournament, and she is sure she can get her son, Rupert, to settle down if she just writes the perfect personal ad for him. Naturally, things turn disastrous rather quickly. And she's about to learn that her perfect home conceals a scandal that would make the vicar blush. Her Lithuanian housekeeper's undergarments keep appearing in her husband's study and her daughter is turning into a Lycra-clad gap-year strumpet. As her family falls apart, Constance embarks on an extraordinary journey. From partying in Ibiza to riding bareback with a handsome Argentinean gaucho whose only English words are "Britney" and "Spears," Constance is about to discover a wider world she thought it was too late to find. Hilarious, inventive, and ultimately heartwarming, A Surrey State of Affairs will appeal to fans of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and the novels of Alexander McCall Smith. "--.

Rosalind "Lin" Townsend, thrown out of the house at the age of seventeen when she becomes pregnant, and rejected by the baby's father, Nick Pemberton, manages to raise her son on her own and is about to send him off to college at New York University nineteen years later when she crosses paths with Nick, now a millionaire, and decides to get revenge by enacting a plan to disrupt his life and his finances.

Marta Schneider, hoping to prove her father wrong in his prediction that she will never be more than a servant, leaves her home in Switzerland to pursue her dream of owning an inn, but she must make many sacrifices when she marries Niclas Waltert in Canada and begins her own family, and in her efforts to make her children strong, finds herself behaving more like her abusive father than her loving mother, especially with her daughter, Hildemara Rose.

When three best friends each face mounting financial difficulties they decide to form a support group--the Small Change Club--to help one another balance their books and clear their debts by making small changes in their spending habits.

Imp, a struggling schizophrenic, fights to determine whether or not the strange mythological creatures she meets are due to her condition or are from something else entirely.