Family Drama Fiction

It was Charlie who chose Lily from among all the cats in the shelter. He didn't frown, the way other humans did, when he saw her injured back leg, the legacy of a cruel previous owner. Instead, Charlie insisted on rescuing her. Now Lily wants to do the same for Charlie. She's the only one who's seen the bruises on Charlie's body. If she knew who was hurting him, she'd scratch their eyes out. But she can't fix this by herself. Lily needs to get the rest of the family to focus on Charlie - not easy when they're wrapped up in their own problems.

Helen lives a decent, uncomplicated life. Satisfied in her career, she’s raising three happy teenagers, and her family has the most envied house on the street. Admittedly, she’s growing just a little disenchanted with her marriage to her workaholic husband, Werner. But that’s nothing she can’t fix. For disaffected, young petty criminals Ralf and Brian, it was a scheme to make some cash: a quick home invasion. The targets they’ve chosen are Helen and Werner. Just as planned, Brian disappears into Helen and Werner’s house. And he never comes out again.

When Rosie's best friend has an affair with her husband, the consequences reverberate through the lives of the two families. Relationships are torn apart, friendships shattered, and childish innocence destroyed. Her daughter Daisy's fragile hold on reality begins to unravel when a letter arrives that opens old wounds. Rosie's son Max blames himself for everything that happened. And her ex-husband Nick has his own version of events. As long-repressed memories bubble to the surface, the past has never seemed more present and the truth more uncertain.

Early one summer morning Isabel and her 11-year-old daughter, River, walk across Regent's Park. They come across a rain-soaked man sitting alone on a bench and ask him if he's okay. But he doesn't know. In fact he doesn't know the answer to any of their questions - not even his own name. Urged on by her daughter, Isabel takes the man to the hospital she works at, hoping that will be the end of it. But when the tests show there's nothing physically wrong with him, and yet he still can't remember who he is, she realises she can't walk away.

In the middle of the night, Evie is torn away from her beloved home and close-knit community as her family run away to the south. Her father's luck has finally run out, but what should mark a hopeful new beginning is just the start of young Evie’s troubles. With the weight of her family's future on her shoulders, Evie has no one to turn to. Her mother, worn down by life, runs off with a new man, and with her grandmother's sight failing, it's left to Evie to earn their keep and run the house. Holding her family together is only made harder when tragedy strikes at its heart.

Janie Treeborne lives on an orchard at the edge of Elberta, Alabama, and in time she has become its keeper. A place where conquistadors once walked and where the peaches they left behind now grow. Elberta has seen fierce battles, violent storms, and frantic change - and when the town is once again threatened from without, Janie realizes it won’t withstand much more.

When the lights go out at a Georgia high school football game, senior Macy Atwood finds herself in the arms of a boy who kisses her senseless - but he's gone by the time the lights come back on. All she knows is that there was something special - and oddly familiar - about her mystery kisser. Noah Granger, Ridgedale's resident bad boy and newest transfer student, has no problem taking credit for the kiss, but Macy can't shake the feeling that he's lying. Especially since a photograph of Macy and former star football player Joel Hargrove resurfaced online moments before the blackout.

Set against the backdrop of the both optimistic and violent 1950s and 1960s, Affections traces the Ertls's slow and inevitable breakdown through the various erratic trajectories of each family member: Hans's undertakings of colossal, foolhardy projects and his subsequent spectacular failures; his daughter Monika, heir to his adventurous spirit, who joins the Bolivian Marxist guerrillas and becomes known as "Che Guevara's avenger"; and his wife and two younger sisters left to pick up the pieces in their wake.

This "richly appointed and generously portrayed" ( Kirkus Reviews) debut novel tells the story of a WASPy, old-Boston family coming face-to-face with an America much larger than the one it was born in. Caroline Dunlap has written off the insular world of the Boston deb parties, golf club luaus, and WASP weddings that she grew up with. But when she reluctantly returns home after her college graduation, she finds that not everything is quite as predictable, or protected, as she had imagined.

To escape their griping grown children, husbands, and lovers, and an abundance of grandchildren underfoot, three self-proclaimed "old bags", Dania, Ruth, and Bess, head for a quiet island on the Aegean Sea. They'll spend a year by the water - watching the sunset, eating grilled fish and fresh olives, sipping ouzo. They deserve it, they say. After all those years, the three women will finally have some peace. Except they can't.

It is the summer of 1992 and a gypsy moth invasion blankets Avalon Island. It is also the summer Leslie Day Marshall - only daughter of Avalon's most prominent family - returns with her husband, a botanist, and their children to live in "The Castle", the island's grandest estate. Leslie's husband Jules is African-American, and their children biracial, and islanders from both sides of the tracks form fast and dangerous opinions about the new arrivals.

Swedish sisters Astrid, Lena, and Sandra have struggled to get along since childhood, but when Lena is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, they are each thrown into crisis together.

From the critically acclaimed author of The Apartment comes a powerful, poetic, and haunting exploration of loss, love, and isolation. An American living in London receives a phone call from a German policewoman telling him the nearly inconceivable news that his sister, Miriam, has been found dead in her Berlin apartment-from starvation. Three weeks later the man, his father, and an American consular official named Trish find themselves in the bizarre surroundings of a fogbound Munich Airport, where Miriam's coffin is set to be loaded onto a commercial jet.

Maddy was always being asked to sing jingles for commercials. She'd sung about chocolate, cereal and dog food. Now she wanted a real acting job. But was she good enough to be an actor? Then came the announcement in class: "Maddy, you have an audition for Halfway Hospital." An audition! She just had to get the job. The second book in a series of entertaining short novels about four girls who attend The Shooting Star drama school.

From the beloved bestselling author of Home Safe and The Year of Pleasures, comes a wonderful new novel about women and men reconnecting with one another—and themselves—at their fortieth high school reunion.

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.

In haunting and crystalline prose, The Train of Small Mercies follows six characters' intrepid search for hope among the debris of an American tragedy.In New York, a young black porter struggles through his first day on the job-a staggering assignment aboard Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train. In Pennsylvania, a woman creates a tangle of lies to sneak away from her disapproving husband and pay her respects to the slain senator, dragging her child with her.

Aaaaaaaaghhhhhhh! Dene screamed at the TV. A commercial for ice-cream had just come on and it starred those twins Evie and Cameron Billingham. We've never spoken to them but we just know they're vomitus. If you walked into an audition and the terrible twins were there, you could forget about it! The first book in an entertaining series of short novels about four girls who attend The Shooting Star drama school.

In 1931 in Carbon Hill, a small Alabama coal-mining town, nine-year-old Tess Moore watches a woman shove the cover off the family well and toss in a baby without a word. For the Moore family, focused on helping anyone in need during the Great Depression, the apparent murder forces them to face the darker side of their community and question the motivations of family and friends.

Actuary Penny Sinclair has a head for business, and she always makes rational decisions. Knowing that 60 percent of spouses cheat and 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, she wasn't too surprised when her husband had an affair. (That he did so with a woman their daughter's age? Well, that part did sting a bit.) She just made sure she got everything in the divorce, including their lovely old Victorian house. And as soon as her younger daughter has her hipster-fabulous wedding in the backyard, she's trading it in for a condo in downtown Chicago....