Family Drama

Kenny Bond is finally out of prison after doing a long stretch for killing a copper and is determined to get back to life on the straight and narrow. Kenny’s son Donny might lack his father’s edge but his twin grandsons, Beau and Brett - well, they are Bonds through and through. Like him, they won’t let anyone stand in their way.

Meet Noh Inji: thirty years old, five wedding rings and counting, and she’s never once been in love. When Inji takes a job at Wedding & Life, the popular matchmaking service, she never imagines her role will be with NM, their secretive marriage division that rents out “field spouses” for a fixed period to their elite clientele. Just like a real marriage, Inji’s assignments involve a wedding, some sex, and a spot of housework. It’s all tailored exactly to the client’s desires—no legal battles, no fights, no emotional baggage.

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.

Today’s middle school girls have it rough. In those few short years, girls go through an incredible number of biological and emotional changes, making it the most formative - and risky - time in their lives. Groups form and turn on each other, childhood friends can reveal trusted secrets just by sending a text message or updating a Facebook status, and deciding where to sit in the cafeteria can be a daily struggle. As any tween will tell you, life for a middle school girl can be summed up in one word: drama.

On a hilltop in Umbria sits Valetto. Once a thriving village—and a hub of resistance and refuge during World War II—centuries of earthquakes, landslides, and the lure of a better life have left it neglected. Only ten residents remain, including the widows Serafino—three eccentric sisters and their steely centenarian mother—who live quietly in their medieval villa. Then their nephew and grandson, Hugh, a historian, returns. But someone else has arrived before him, laying claim to the cottage where Hugh spent his childhood summers.

When Shelley first met Greg, her life had been full of possibility. A whirlwind romance, a dream wedding, moving into their first house together, thinking about starting a family.... But now, it’s 10 years since their wedding. Greg has gone. And there’s a room in the house where Shelley has shut a baby blanket away. She’s been managing to hide from her past. Until one day, everything changes. She sees the couple moving in next door, giggling as they walk up the path to their new home. The woman is pregnant. It’s like she has everything that Shelley has lost.

Bea couldn't be more excited to trade the stifling Stockholm summer heat for vacation on Gotland Island. She’s looking forward to spending quality time with her beloved husband of thirty-two years, Niklas, and their two moody teenage daughters, and recuperating from the stress of daily life in the company of her beloved in-laws. One night shortly before their departure, Bea and Niklas have a seemingly mundane argument over a trivial issue, and Niklas goes out with a friend to blow off steam.

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.

Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister, Cassandra, enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways.

A researcher, therapist, and mediator, Robert Emery, PhD, details a new approach to sharing custody with children in two homes. Huge numbers of children are affected by separation, divorce, cohabitation breakups, and childbearing outside of marriage. These children have two homes. But their parents have only one chance to protect their childhood.

FBI forensic linguist Raisa Susanto thinks she’s through with the past now that her psychopathic serial killer sister, Isabel, is locked away forever. Then Raisa receives a letter from Isabel. It’s just a single message: By the time you read this, I’ll be dead. Soon after, Isabel is discovered dead in her cell, forcing Raisa back into her depraved orbit—one that includes a band of true-crime worshippers obsessed with Isabel, her killing spree, and those who survived it.

It’s been three years since Claire Kite lost her husband, David, an aspiring novelist, in a tragic car accident. Claire finally finds the courage to move on; then she discovers among the remnants of her shattered world her husband’s last manuscript. It’s intimate, stirring - and unfinished. An idea comes to her.... What if she can find someone to give David’s novel the ending it deserves?

Ginny Beale is 18, irreverent, funny, and brave, with a brother she adores and a circle of friends for whom she would do anything. Because of one terrible night, she loses them all - and her adventurous spirit - seemingly forever. While the town cheers on the high school football team, someone sets the school’s auditorium ablaze. Ginny's best friend Gray Marsden's father, a firefighter, dies in the blaze.

Despite having jobs and men that they love, each knows that something is missing: the closeness that once sustained them. Carmen is a successful actress in New York, engaged to be married, but misses her friends. Lena finds solace in her art, teaching in Rhode Island, but still thinks of Kostos and the road she didn’t take. Bridget lives with her longtime boyfriend, Eric, in San Francisco, and though a part of her wants to settle down, a bigger part can’t seem to shed her old restlessness. Then Tibby reaches out to bridge the distance, sending the others plane tickets for a reunion....

Filmmaker Tessa Shepherd helped free a man she believed was wrongly imprisoned for murder. When he kills again, Tessa’s life is upended. She’s reeling with guilt, her reputation destroyed. Worse, Tessa’s mother has unexpectedly passed away, and her sister, Margot, turns on her after tensions from their past escalate. Hounded by a bullying press, Tessa needs an escape. That’s when she learns of a strange inheritance bequeathed by her mother: a derelict and isolated estate known as Fallbrook. It seems like the perfect refuge.

When it comes to men, Nealy is very content with her new husband, lawyer Hatch Littletree. When it comes to horses, she is never satisfied. Nobody can measure up to her standards as a trainer, not even her daughter, Emmie, who now runs the family's famous stables, Blue Diamond Farms. But returning to Blue Diamond Farms for a family reunion sends Nealy reeling. Emmie has let the farm slide, and she has picked a small, gutsy colt to send to the Derby - a nice horse but clearly the wrong one.

Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past.

Ae-ran Kim's My Brilliant Life explores family bonds and out-of-the-ordinary friendships, interweaving the past and present of a tight-knit family, finding joy and happiness in even the most difficult times. Areum lives life to its fullest, vicariously through the stories of his parents, conversations with Little Grandpa Jang - his 60-year-old neighbor and best friend - and through the books he reads to visit the places he would otherwise never see.

In the second book in number one New York Times best selling author Sandra Brown’s beloved Texas! trilogy, listeners meet another son of the troubled Tyler clan - Chase Tyler, a man hardened by life and desperately trying to outrun the sorrows of his past. Chase Tyler has been the object of Marcie Johns’s desire since grade school. But when it came time to settle down, the handsome, laconic cowboy chose another woman to be his bride. Life was good for Chase - until things took an abrupt and tragic turn.

The world has changed around 79-year-old librarian Millicent Carmichael, a.k.a. Missy. Though quick to admit that she often found her roles as a housewife and mother less than satisfying, Missy once led a bustling life driven by two children, an accomplished and celebrated husband, and a Classics degree from Cambridge. Now, her husband is gone, her daughter is estranged after a shattering argument, and her son has moved to his wife's native Australia, taking Missy's beloved only grandchild half-a-world away.