"Darling," my friend Gemma texted me one morning. "You need to get..."

When I was a kid, my mom adhered to a small repertoire of easy dinners...

"My novels always seem to contain a self-fulfilling prophecy," says J. Courtney Sullivan. "I write something, and then it happens in my life." In her latest book, The Cliffs, a woman named Jane moves back to her hometown and winds up in a Victorian house. Then, Courtney also moved back to her hometown and landed in an old Victorian — along with her husband, two kids, and 13-year-old dog. Come take a look around...