Contemporary Family Life

Gwen Castle's Biggest Mistake Ever, Cassidy Somers, is slumming it as a yard boy on her idyllic Nantucket-esque island this summer. He's a rich kid from across the bridge in Stony Bay, and she hails from a family of fishermen and housecleaners who keep the island's summer people happy. Gwen worries a life of cleaning houses will be her fate too, but just when it looks like she'll never escape her past - or the island - Gwen's dad gives her some shocking advice.

Twelve Years. It’s been twelve years since the last time I heard from the Aldridge family. That one voicemail changes everything - I need the money the late William offers. In exchange, I have to live eighteen months in Baker’s Creek. I’ve survived cancer, the jungle, and the plague. This should be easy compared to all that, right? Or so I think until...I see him.

Even on their wedding day, John and Irene sensed that they were about to make a mistake. Years later, divorced, dating other people, and living in different parts of the country, they seem to have nothing in common - nothing except the most important person in each of their lives: Sadie, their spirited eighteen-year-old daughter. Feeling smothered by Irene and distanced from John, Sadie is growing more and more attached to her new boyfriend, Ron. When tragedy strikes, Irene and John come together to support the daughter they love so dearly.

Thelma is the busy single mum of 12-year-old Louis. When he is hit by a lorry one morning, their lives are changed for ever. Louis falls into a coma, and if he doesn't regain consciousness in the next four weeks, he may never wake up again. At home in Louis' bedroom, a devastated Thelma finds a list of all the things he wants to accomplish in his life and suddenly sees a way to survive: she will fulfil her son's dreams, in the hope that it will bring him back.

Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are. It’s been a year since Billie Flanagan — a Berkeley mom with an enviable life — went on a solo hike in Desolation Wilderness and vanished from the trail. Her body was never found, just a shattered cellphone and a solitary hiking boot. Her husband and teenage daughter have been coping with Billie’s death the best they can: Jonathan drinks as he works on a loving memoir about his marriage; Olive grows remote, from both her father and her friends at the all-girls school she attends.

"Il me reste quelques rêves à réaliser et le moment est venu de m'y atteler. Je vous aime très fort. À très bientôt ! Maman." Léna n'en revient pas. Comment sa mère, qui l'a convoquée pour passer Noël dans la maison de son enfance, a-t-elle pu disparaître en ne lui laissant que ce message sibyllin ? La voilà donc coincée dans le petit village de Vallenot au cœur des Alpes de Haute-Provence et condamnée à passer la fête qu'elle hait plus que tout, entourée de sa famille pour le moins... haute en couleur ! Mais les fêtes de famille ont le don de faire rejaillir les secrets enfouis.

Clendenin Hughes first kissed Dabney Kimball during a Nantucket snowstorm freshman year of high school. Ever since that moment - God, the rush, the chemistry! - Dabney has known that she and Clen are an unsplittable unit - essentially the same person in two different bodies. Of course, with Dabney now at Harvard and Clen at Yale, those bodies are 140 miles apart. A stirring portrait of young love at a crossroads, The Tailgate introduces two irresistible characters and invites us into a world we don't want to leave.

Since moving to Cedar Cove, Jo Marie Rose has truly started to feel at home, and her neighbors have become her closest friends. Now it's springtime, and Jo Marie is eager to finish the most recent addition to her inn. In memory of her late husband, Paul, she has designed a beautiful rose garden for the property and enlisted handyman Mark Taylor to help realize it. She and Mark don't always see eye-to-eye - and at times he seems far removed - yet deep down, Jo Marie finds great comfort in his company.

From the best-selling author of The Beekeeper’s Promise comes a gripping story of three young women faced with impossible choices. How will history - and their families - judge them? Paris, 1940. With the city occupied by the Nazis, three young seamstresses go about their normal lives as best they can. But all three are hiding secrets. War-scarred Mireille is fighting with the Resistance; Claire has been seduced by a German officer; and Vivienne’s involvement is something she can’t reveal to either of them.

The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, by prize-winning Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, is a novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption. The protagonist, Liu Yuejin, is a worksite cook and small-time thief whose bag is stolen. In searching for it, he stumbles upon another bag, which contains a flash disk that chronicles high-level corruption.

After a whirlwind romance, a young woman returns to the opulent, secluded Long Island mansion of her new fiancé, Max Winter - a wealthy politician and recent widower - and a life of luxury she’s never known. But all is not as it appears at the Asherley estate. The house is steeped in the memory of Max’s beautiful first wife, Rebekah, who haunts the young woman’s imagination and feeds her uncertainties, while his very alive teenage daughter, Dani, makes her life a living hell.

Detective Shane Ford, Sugarland's favorite cop, has been blindsided by the sudden death of his best friend, NFL star Brad Cooper, and by becoming the legal guardian of Brad's son, Drew - a bitter, angry 16-year-old with a dangerous secret. Shane is determined to pry the truth from Drew, but he manages only to alienate him - and winds up going head-to-head with Juvenile Officer Daisy Callahan, whose job is to protect the teen's best interests.

When a group of neighborhood women gathers, wine in hand, around a fire pit where their backyards meet one Saturday night, most of them are just ecstatic to have discovered that their baby monitors reach that far. It's a rare kid-free night, and they're giddy with it. They drink too much, and the conversation turns personal. By Monday morning, one of them is gone. Everyone knows something about everyone else in the quirky small Ohio town of Yellow Springs, but no one can make sense of the disappearance.

When it comes to men, Nealy is very content with her new husband, lawyer Hatch Littletree. When it comes to horses, she is never satisfied. Nobody can measure up to her standards as a trainer, not even her daughter, Emmie, who now runs the family's famous stables, Blue Diamond Farms. But returning to Blue Diamond Farms for a family reunion sends Nealy reeling. Emmie has let the farm slide, and she has picked a small, gutsy colt to send to the Derby - a nice horse but clearly the wrong one.

Laid off, cheated on, mugged: what else can go wrong in Maeve Stephens’ life? So when she learns her birth mother has left her a house, a vintage VW Beetle, and a marauding cat in the small town of Timber Creek, Washington, she packs up to discover the truth about her past. She arrives to the sight of a cheerful bulldog abandoned on her front porch, a reclusive but tempting author living next door, and a set of ready-made friends at the St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets, where women knit colorful sweaters for the dogs and cats in their care.

Ava Ingerson knows what she wants: The beautiful California beach house she just inherited, a career in teaching supplemented with income from her vacation guests, and a life full of friends, fun, and family - right here in Seahaven, California. She’s never moving again, no matter what, so when handsome entrepreneur Samuel Cross arrives to stay at her beach house for two weeks, Ava knows the last thing she should do is act on her attraction to him.

In the Irish town of Schancarrig, the young people carve their initials - and those of their loves - into the copper beech tree in front of the schoolhouse. But not even Father Gunn, the parish priest, who knows most of what goes on behind Shancarrig's closed doors, or Dr. Jims, the village doctor, who knows all the rest, realizes that not everything in the placid village is what it seems.

Sam is 28, Swedish and spending the summer in London, working for a top marketing agency. Over the course of the sticky summer months, she falls hard for Lucas, a man she first met as a teenager. Lucas is working at a boutique clothing store whilst trying to get a foot on the corporate ladder, and struggling to hold the pieces of his life together. Sam is a gorgeous distraction. But you can only avoid reality for so long, and both Sam and Lucas know their relationship can't last. Nobody can be this happy forever, surely?

August Hanson was the silent type, the kind who spoke through his actions and not his words. He possessed enough power to make me feel safe and secure. I was ready to open up and share the parts of myself I’d never shared with another, and then I got hit with a truth that changed everything. There was a slight chance he’d still want me, only he had to accept our baby, too.

Everyone is talking about Jennie Sue Baker and the mess she made of her life in New York. The former high school queen bee - and wealthy darling of Bloom, Texas - has returned home after all these years, riding on a common bus and bearing two bounced alimony checks. In a town that thrives on gossip, Jennie’s fall from grace has shamed her mother, set the town buzzing, and caused old, jealous enemies to whisper in delight. They say she’s taken a job as a housekeeper, gotten a garage apartment, and might be crushing on Rick Lawson, a simple farmer with modest dreams.