Family Drama

For eleven-year-old Esme, ballet is everything - until her four-year-old sister, Lily, vanishes without a trace and nothing is certain anymore. People Esme has known her whole life suddenly become suspects, each new one hitting closer to home than the last. Unable to cope, Esme escapes the nightmare that is her new reality when she receives an invitation to join an elite ballet academy in San Francisco. Desperate to leave behind her chaotic, broken family and the mystery surrounding Lily’s disappearance, Esme accepts.

Lina Henry is a wife and mother who likens herself to a pretty paper doll. She lives in a beautiful home in the Atlanta suburbs. Her husband, David, is a well-to-do investment banker. She’s raised two wonderful teenagers. To the outside world, the Henry family is perfect. What no one knows is that Lina’s paper doll life is being torn apart in a controlling and abusive marriage. Then Lina develops an unexpected friendship with another man, and reconnects with her former best friend. But as David senses his loss of control, he becomes more dangerous.

It’s been twenty-six years since the accident, but Helen still lives on autopilot, going through the motions of work and motherhood. Her one wish is for her daughter Julia to settle down with her own family - so Helen can let go. Julia has dealt with her mother’s emotional distance by looking for love in all the wrong places. But when her latest choice drives away her best friend, Claire, Julia realises she’s on her own.

At the age of thirty-nine, Alice Chang suddenly finds herself living in the last place she expected: her mother’s house. But in the face of divorce, eviction, and the recent death of her father, she doesn’t have a choice. Watching as her mother thrives in a new job and meets younger men at the local gym, Alice struggles, reflecting on her parents’ marriage, her relationship with each of them, as she adjusts to being single again for the first time in twenty years. Then she finds her father’s old journal...and uncovers a shocking family secret.

Grace first met Mimi when she blew into their sons’ toddler playgroup like a warm bay breeze that loosened Grace’s tight spaces. Despite differing approaches to life and parenting, the fast friends raised their kids together while cementing a sisterlike bond that neither believed could be broken. But when a string of ill-fated decisions results in a teen party with a tragic outcome for Grace’s son, the friendship is ripped apart and an already-splintered community explodes.

The only life Mae has ever known is on the island, living on the charity of the wealthy Prosper family who control the magic on the island and the spirits who inhabit it. Mae longs for magic of her own and to have a place among the Prosper family, where her best friend, Coco, will see her as an equal, and her crush, Miles, will finally see her. Now that she’s 18, Mae knows her time with the Prospers may soon come to an end.

If confidence was a women’s size 20, then its name would have to be Aspen St. Andrews. The 31-year-old freelance journalist is living life on her own terms, except in one area. Love. She feels somewhat stuck in an engagement to a man that she once loved and that she decided to cohabitate with. They argue about her career as if it’s a hobby and Aspen is sick of it.

The way children cope with the small things in life builds a foundation for dealing with the bigger problems later on. In ‘Everyday Resilience’, you can learn how to help kids deal with increasing challenges of friendship issues, academic pressure and self-doubt. With rising mental health issues amongst children and young people, it has never been more important to nurture resilience. acked with every day scenarios and practical steps, ‘Everyday Resilience’ provides every parent with tools to nurture strength in young lives.

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.

I’m Cora Fletcher, a twenty-something book-loving public relations executive, living with my overly Zen best friend and my attention-loving cat. I’m newly single and focusing on my exciting career, so I feel like I’m in a good place. I’ve even been invited on an all-expenses-paid Hawaiian vacation! The only catch? It’s a family reunion . . . and my family can be a lot to handle. My mom has filled the itinerary with endless activities, and she’s even invited my ex-boyfriend in a misguided attempt to get us back together.

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.

In London England, an exact replica of the 17th century William Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre opened in 1995. Audio journalist, Lee Daley is exploring the Globe Theatre with actress and docent, Kitty Grimes. Ms Grimes tells us how the new Globe Theatre began while we walk through the scrim and into a Shakespeare past.

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.

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.

In the Connecticut suburbs, a motherless young man suddenly becomes the beneficiary of a wealthy older couple, whose generosity has unsuspected motives and a sinister price. On an island in Australia’s Torres Strait, an enigmatic castaway throws kinks into the local culture and sexual politics. And in the jungles of Vietnam, four American soldiers undertake a mystical search for a man-eating tiger.

I just found out I have an identical twin. Wasn’t looking for one. Would have preferred to not have one, but here we are. We have nothing in common. I was adopted by a successful businessman who raised me to see life as a game and gave me the skills to win it. Him? He is about to lose his family’s farm. You heard me—farm. Lucky for him, I’m a firm believer that when it comes to family, no one goes to battle alone. I’m in. I’ve switched lives with him and will use every business trick I know to save his farm.

Lena Sharma is a successful San Francisco restaurateur. An immigrant, she’s cultivated an image of conservatism and tradition in her close-knit Indian community. But when Lena’s carefully constructed world begins to crumble, her ties to her daughter, Maya, and son, Sameer - both raised in thoroughly modern California - slip further away.

Isla knows her family kept things from her. When she inherits the cliffside cottage where she spent her childhood, she must face dark shadows of her past—the mother who rejected her in favour of her art, the aunt whose death haunted them both, and the silence that permeated every room. Digging through the belongings of someone she realises she never really knew, Isla finally has the chance to find answers to the secrets her mother spent a lifetime hiding.