Family Drama Fiction

Jessica Darling is in her senior year of high school, and things can’t seem to get worse: Her best friend, Hope, still lives in another state, and the mysterious and oh-so-compelling Marcus Flutie continues to be a distraction she doesn’t need. Not to mention her parents won’t get off her back about choosing a college, and her older sister’s pregnancy is causing quite a bit of drama in the Darling household.

It’s been fifteen years since Gem’s eight-year-old daughter Sara-Jane went missing, snatched with her best friend Abby right outside their school. A frantic search united the community at first, but after Abby was found and brought home, single mother Gem’s dogged persistence only led to accusations that she was stirring up class tensions. Even that she was somehow involved.

When the news hits that E.T.: The Musical wasn’t nominated for a single Tony Award - not one! - the show closes, leaving Nate both out of luck and out of a job. And while Nate’s cast mates are eager to move on, Nate knows it’s back to square one, also known as Jankburg, Pennsylvania. Where horror (read: high school) awaits. Desperate to turn his life from flop to fabulous, Nate takes on a huge freshman English project with his BFF, Libby: He’s going to make a musical out of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. What could possibly go...right?

Dublin 1996. Joan Egan lives an enviable life. She and her husband, Martin, and daughter, Carmel, are thriving in Dublin at the dawn of an economic boom. But everything changes when Joan receives a letter from Emma, the daughter who she and Martin gave up for adoption thirty years before, asking for a life-or-death favor.

When billionaire and tech start-up capitalist Gian Romano strikes a bet with his niece Judy - the daughter of Dominic Corisi - to find even more of the Corisi family, his search leads him to the Boston area. But when he pops into a store, the woman who runs it becomes an instant distraction from his mission. Teagan is beautiful, strong, and too smart not to see through him. Together they discover the past still has the power to hurt the ones they both love.

Bestselling advice columnist Vandy Guru built her career teaching others how to live honestly and courageously, but after the loss of her husband, Vandy’s public veneer can barely conceal her grief. When her beloved daughter Mallika suddenly disappears and her estranged childhood best friend Rani returns, stirring up long-buried secrets, Vandy’s carefully crafted life feels at risk.

Allie Finkle is excited when a new girl - who comes all the way from Canada - joins her class at Pine Heights Elementary. Now Allie won't be the new girl anymore!But her excitement turns to dismay when the new girl, Cheyenne, starts creating drama and telling everyone in the fourth grade what to do!

After ten hectic years in Seoul, burned-out expat Radley Asher is promised a change—working the fall season at an apple farm in idyllic Fox Isle, Maine. Hoping for solitude, Radley is instead welcomed by the effusive Clark family as one of their own. A loner like Radley finds it almost disarming. But what’s not to like? Beau and Livia are doting parents, and their three children are absolute delights. Still, Radley prefers to keep her distance and just watch the lives of the Clarks unfold from her window.

Alex Mahan is married to his high school sweetheart, Taylor. They have two daughters and a beautiful home, and Alex’s startup business is about to explode thanks to massive private funding from his compassionate and supportive father-in-law, Joe. With millions more to come, all is perfect - until Joe is abducted and murdered during a family trip in Mexico.

The author of the highly acclaimed The Fates Will Find Their Way returns with a novel about a far-flung family reunited for one weekend by their father's death. Five minutes before her flight is set to take off, Kate Pulaski, failed screenwriter and newly failed wife with scarcely a hundred dollars to her name, learns that her estranged father has killed himself. More shocked than saddened by the news, she gives in to her siblings' request that she join them, along with her many half-siblings and most of her father's five former wives, in Atlanta, their birthplace.

Charlotte Coburn has a tragically dark past. But she’s safe now. She lives in a gated community, protected from danger. When teenager Elle knocks at her door looking for shelter during a particularly severe storm, the woman can’t help but think how lucky Elle’s been to have found someone as friendly as her. Except Elle chose her door on purpose...

At first the death of William Baldwine, the head of the Bradford family, was ruled a suicide. But then his eldest son and sworn enemy, Edward, came forward and confessed to what was, in fact, a murder. Now in police custody, Edward mourns not the disintegration of his family or his loss of freedom...but the woman he left behind. His love, Sutton Smythe, is the only person he has ever truly cared about, but as she is the CEO of the Bradford Bourbon Company's biggest competitor, any relationship between them is impossible.

In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.

For Lena, the upcoming year is going to be epic—one of opportunities and chances. Until one choice, one moment, destroys everything. Now Lena isn't looking forward to tomorrow. Not when friend time may never be the same. Not when college applications feel all but impossible. Not when Sebastian might never forgive her for what happened. For what she let happen. With the guilt growing each day, Lena knows that her only hope is to move on. But how can she move on when her and her friends' entire existences have been redefined? How can she move on when tomorrow isn't even guaranteed?

I'm going to make her my queen. One wedding. One child. Five years. Ten million dollars. Those are the terms of our contract. My offer is sound, bold, and necessary. In order to gain my inheritance, I have to have a wife. She thinks her clause will keep me from having her skin on mine. She's very wrong. The de Loughrey's rule the world, and I am their king. I get what I want, and what I want is her. I'll have her beneath me no matter what.

Ellen has a lot to be thankful for. Her fiancé, Troy, is perfectly sweet. Her childhood friend Tanya, despite her edgier taste in men, is like a sister to Ellen: her closest friend—and rival. So familiar and yet, over the years, so many secrets between them. For Ellen, what lies ahead is a series of choices that will add up to a life she never could have imagined.

Matthew Daley is a Manhattan corporate lawyer at the top of his game. As the first defense attorney on call to get pharmaceutical companies out of trouble, Matt is rising in the judicial system exactly as he planned. Until his sister dies of a heroin overdose. Now, torn between conscience and career, the newly minted law partner faces a critical choice: Defend the very companies that manufactured the addictive drugs, or give up his fiancée and his hard-won dream job to fight for justice in his sister’s name.

Forensic psychologist Callum Kilkenny lost his wife, Shay, to the very serial killer he’d hunted for five years. When Nathaniel Conrad—known as the Alphabet Man, for his love of tattooing codes onto his victims’ bodies—was condemned to death row, Callum thought the game of cat and mouse was over. But just before execution, Nathaniel drops a bombshell: he’s not the one who murdered Shay.

From the outside looking in, Sibley Sawyer has a perfect life. As a successful attorney, she’s worked hard to get to the top of her game--but when her personal and professional lives implode, Sibley looks for a way to turn the page. Unable to shake the tragic circumstances that caused her to flee her rural Midwestern hometown, Sibley wants nothing more than to reunite with her estranged mother, Deborah, and bury their past tensions. But as she reenters the life she left behind, she realizes her mother isn’t the same person she remembers, and she’s not the same daughter either.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama and author of Homeland Elegies, a "sparkling and combustible" play about identity in America after September 11 (Bloomberg).