Family Drama Fiction

It’s 1947 when Sister Mary Agnes arrives in New Mexico. Her mission is to establish a monastery in the town of Roswell, where weeks before rumors of the crash landing of an unidentified craft have triggered a crisis of faith. Residents are drifting away from the divine, awed no longer by the heavens but rather the stars.

In this suspenseful and deeply moving novel, Michael Thomas Ford propels us beyond smiling holiday photographs and beloved anecdotes to explore the complex ties within one family - and between two very different brothers whom catastrophe will either unite or divide forever....

As a child, it was always Neef and her mother, Chrissy—troubled, beautiful, at the mercy of addiction and a revolving door of bad boyfriends. When Neef turns twelve, it is Neef and Chrissy and Barry, the much-older man who moves them from their derelict council estate in Leeds to a small Yorkshire town where he runs the local pub. On her first day in her new home, it becomes Neef and Danny, the boy who captures her attention planting flowers in the pub garden—and then, it is somehow always Danny.

When Nova Doubeck is asked to foster two children, she can’t say no. With her own childhood wounds healed by adoptive parents, Nova understands the rewards of a caring guardian—even an impermanent one. But nine-year-old Henry and his seven-year-old sister, Bella, are more than Nova bargained for.

Three generations. One summer that will change everything. Jenna has returned to the sunny shores of Lake Summers, tucked under the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, with her daughter Sophie to care for her aging mother, Sweet. Recently divorced, Jenna finds comfort in lazy afternoons along the water and long nights watching Sweet tell Sophie stories about her long-lost loves. When she meets Sweet’s new next-door neighbor, Troy, she recognizes him instantly as the boy with whom she shared her first kiss.

Nikki and Kyle Sebastian have a loving and healthy marriage. It’s only missing one thing they want—children. When the couple is diagnosed with “unexplained infertility” and endures several failed rounds of IVF, Kyle, for both their sakes, is unwilling to bury them deeper in emotional and financial debt. Desperate to have a baby, Nikki betrays Kyle’s trust in an attempt to try IVF one more time. The choice fractures their once-stable union. Now burdened with suspicion, resentment, and further grief, their little family is falling apart.

Lawyer Gabby Lewis always knew she would die young. Since her mother’s death twenty-five years ago, she’s dreaded her upcoming fortieth birthday, the same age her mother died. When she discovers a connection between her mother and a suspicious mansion house, Ocean Haven, Gabby begins to suspect that her mother’s death wasn’t an accident, it was murder.

A family secret. A new romance. And a summer she will never forget. When Caroline left Lake Summers thirty years ago, she thought she’d never return to the place where she lost her parents. But when she finds out that the town’s lily garden lovingly built by her mother is going to be destroyed, she knows fate is calling. Dropping everything at her office in Chicago, she knows she is the only person who can save the garden. Caroline and her daughter Lee are welcomed home by the warm smile of her mother’s best friend Maxine, and piles of pancakes at her cozy little restaurant in town.

Jodie and Harper are destined to be on the West End stage side by side. They've lived and worked on that dream all their lives but, in a split second, their world divides. Harper is left disabled after a black taxi ploughs into her and Jodie has to return to her stage career alone. After the accident, the doctors tell Harper she will live, but she'll be a wheelchair user. Jodie vows to never leave her side, but Harper knows that's not what she needs.

Morgan and Devon Gregson Bennett are an interracial creative power couple living happily enough in Brooklyn until a freak accident leaves a little girl orphaned in Los Angeles. Setting aside reservations about the price motherhood will exact on their marriage and careers, Morgan and Devon agree to adopt Vabeh, a bi-racial ethnic-hair-products heiress. Vabeh touches down in New York, wearing last season’s fur and on a mission to quickly distinguish herself from the other bold-faced names at her new school, the tony School for Spoiled Kids.

Harriet and Mark have it all: successful careers, a lovely house in a leafy London suburb, twin boys on the cusp of leaving home. Yvette and Gary share a smaller place with their two daughters in a shabbier part of the same borough. But when the stars align for a collective move north, it means a fresh start for them all. For Mark, it’s a chance to escape the rat race; for Harriet, a distraction from her unfulfilled dream of a late third child. Gary has decided to reboot the Madchester band that made him famous, while Yvette hopes it will give her daughters what she never had.

Best friends Lily and Inga do everything together—they even meet their future loves at the same bar. After one serendipitous night, it seems like it’s going to be Lily and Alex and Inga and Matt forever. But life gets more complicated. A job offer moves Inga and Matt from Norwich to London. Lily, who craves stability after a traumatic childhood, is already struggling with the change when Inga confides in her a secret that could tear the group apart for good. At the same time, Lily’s friendship with Matt deepens, and she wonders if she was always meant to be with him instead of Alex.

On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway, in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments. Against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1980s, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth Brennan, longs only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico.

Estranged from her family, Natasha is making a life for herself in Darwin when her sister calls with bad news. Their mother is ill, and has only a few months to live. Confused and conflicted, Natasha returns to the home she fled many years before. But her father, an evangelical Christian, has not changed – he is still the domineering yet magnetic man she ran from, and her sisters and mother are still in his thrall. One night, her father makes an astonishing announcement – he has received a message from God that his wife is to be healed, and they must hold a party to celebrate.

At twenty-one years old, Gia Kumari finally leaves the Delhi orphanage where she was raised. With few prospects for the future, she receives an unexpected invitation from a stranger named Sonia Shah in San Francisco: an internship at Sonia’s weddings and events company. Gia and America. It’s love at first sight as she navigates an unfamiliar but irresistible new world of firsts.

Secrets shared can bind hearts, but secrets concealed? That's a tale of its own. The year is 1884. Robert Cooke and his pregnant wife Freya tragically lose their two sons to scarlet fever, sending Freya into self-imposed isolation for the safety of their unborn child. Cut off from each other, their shared grief becomes a silent, destructive foe. A decade later and now a successful businessman, Robert conceives a poignant tribute to his lost sons - a pleasure garden. But in withholding his vision from Freya, he widens the gulf between them.

Smash all the Windows won the inaugural Selfies Book Award in 2019. It has taken conviction to right the wrongs. It will take courage to learn how to live again. London, 22 August 2003. A day that began like any other would end in tragedy. Fifty-eight people set off for work, only to never return. For more than thirteen years, the search for truth has eaten up everything: marriages, families, health, careers and finances. A flawed justice system failed the victims' kin, but hope arises when a rookie law student scrutinizes the disaster and uncovers potential answers.

Honor Guinness is rich, aristocratic, shy and awkward—nothing like her glamorous cousins Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh. But when she marries the charming and ambitious American Henry 'Chips' Channon, together, they make the perfect couple. Determined to conquer London society, they are soon are at the heart of the best social circles—including a close friendship with the Prince of Wales and Mrs Wallis Simpson. But within the marriage, all is less than perfect.

Vale Lightner’s dreams turn to ash when the Pittsburgh bar she owns goes up in flames. Just like the past she escaped, very little seems salvageable. Facing unavoidable change, Vale returns to her hometown of Philadelphia to stay with her grandmother. She knows that returning also means facing everything she left behind: a mother and stepfather who shunted her into the background from the day they married, and her charmed and favored half sister, Blythe, who has abandoned a perfect marriage and is now at a crossroads of her own.

Wales between the wars, a place of poverty and a world full of anguish. Yet, there is hope. Within family, within community and most of all in the brave heart of one young girl. Set in the lush Dulais Valley; Carrie is fated to a life of hardship and sorrow, but she grows stronger as she is forced to become a woman before her time. The hand she is dealt becomes a challenge and she refuses to surrender.