Family Drama Fiction

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?

When Susan Tate's seventeen-year-old daughter, Lily, announces she is pregnant, Susan is stunned. A single mother, she has struggled to do everything right. She sees the pregnancy as an unimaginable tragedy for both Lily and herself. Then comes word of two more pregnancies among high school juniors who happen to be Lily's best friends-and the town turns to talk of a pact. As fingers start pointing, the most ardent criticism is directed at Susan. As principal of the high school, she has always been held up as a role model of hard work and core values.

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.

Isobel Johnson has spent her career in Liston Heights sidestepping the community’s high-powered families. But when she receives a threatening voicemail accusing her of anti-Americanism and a liberal agenda, she’s in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Julia Abbott, obsessed with the casting of the school’s winter musical, makes an error in judgment that has far-reaching consequences for her entire family.

Billington, Texas, is a place where nothing changes. Well, almost nothing. For the first time in nearly four decades, Mary Alice Roth is not getting ready for the first day of school at Billington High. A few months into her retirement—or, district mandated exile as she calls it—Mary Alice does not know how to fill her days.

A girl dies one late, rainy night a few feet from the back door of her home. The girl, Abeba, was born in Ethiopia. Her adoptive parents, Delvin and Betsy Harvey—conservative, white fundamentalist Christians—are charged with her murder.

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.

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.

Dover, Massachusetts, 1969. Ginny Richardson's heart was torn open when her baby girl, Lucy, born with Down syndrome, was taken from her. Under pressure from his powerful family, her husband, Ab, sent Lucy away to Willowridge, a special school for the "feeble-minded". Ab tried to convince Ginny it was for the best. But two years later, when Ginny's best friend, Marsha, shows her a series of articles exposing Willowridge as a hell-on-earth - its squalid hallways filled with neglected children - she knows she can't leave her daughter there.

As single mother Leah struggles to get her children ready one morning, the doorbell rings. Standing on the doorstep of their terraced house in Whitley Bay is a well-dressed stranger, Clio, who feels an emotional tie to the house that she can’t explain.

To the people of Uztar, nothing in their world is more revered than the birds of prey and no one more honored than the falconers who call them to their fists. Brysen strives to be a great falconer - while his twin sister, Kylee, rejects her ancient gifts for the sport and wishes to be free of falconry. She’s nearly made it out, too, but a war is rolling toward their home in the Six Villages, and no bird or falconer will be safe. Together, the twins must journey into the treacherous mountains to trap the Ghost Eagle, the greatest of the Uztari birds and a solitary killer.

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?

Early into the tempestuous decade of her thirties, Rae Langdon struggles to work through a grief she never anticipated. With her father, Connor, she tends to their Ohio farm, a forty-acre spread that itself has enjoyed better days. As memories sweep through her, some too precious to bear, Rae gives shelter from a brutal winter to a teenager named Quinn Galecki.

She says that she’s his daughter. Could the shocking claim be true? Beatrice is speechless. It’s something she never expected—a secret daughter. She and Aiden have only just renewed their romance after decades apart, and he never mentioned a child. Did he know she existed? Their budding relationship may not survive a scandal this big. Penny’s brother comes back into her life along with her high school nemesis, his best friend. There’s one rule her brother has always held his friends to—no dating his sister. But she’s an adult now. Does the rule still stand?

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.

A hulking freighter waits at a darkened pier. Aboard, filmmaker Carl Denham prepares for a strange voyage to a distant island, an island where he hopes to make the most exciting movie of all time. What waits at the end of the journey is Kong.

Nick Abbott and Trent Dawson have nothing in common but basketball. Or so it seems. But as the basketball season progresses, their lives become unexpectedly intertwined. In this story of an unlikely bond, award-winning author Carl Deuker explores that dark and confusing place between loneliness and friendship, between faithfulness and betrayal.

The last thing Vi Purdet wanted to do was spend Thanksgiving weekend putting a roof on her parents' house with her two asshole brothers. There was a storm headed their way: a rain storm and a shit storm.

Desperate to break free of small-town Florida, Addie Anne Buckley dreams of following in the path of her glamorous aunt Jean—known to the world as Marilyn Monroe. When Aunt Jean plans a trip to Hollywood for Addie’s eighteenth birthday, Addie sees her chance to escape. One thing stands in her way: her boyfriend. Truitt Holt is Addie’s first and only love and will be joining her in California. But days before Addie’s due to leave, Truitt does an about-face and gives her a painful ultimatum: stay and marry him, or they’re through. Addie chooses her dream.

One drop of blood for a chance at a multimillion-dollar windfall. Is it a philanthropic gesture from a billionaire widow? Some suspect a darker motive behind the DNA lottery—one tied to the eighteen-year-old mystery of an infant’s unidentified remains that mars the history of idyllic Rosemary Hills, Iowa. Right after the blood lottery is announced, three local women fall under suspicion of knowing something about that night, and their carefully kept secrets threaten to spill out too.