Family Genre

Amsterdam, 1941. When the Nazis invade Amsterdam, singer Johanna Vos watches in horror as her Jewish friends are forbidden from performing with her onstage, and the vibrant music scene she loves is all but erased. Johanna helps organize the Artists’ Resistance, an underground network that arranges for Jewish musicians to perform at house concerts hosted by their allies. When Johanna is told about a Jewish orphan who is headed for deportation, she does not think twice: she takes the baby in as her own, hiding the truth from everyone, including her sister, Liesbeth.

In 1979, Vincent Bianco has just graduated high school. His only desire: collect a little beer money and enjoy his final summer before college. So he lands a job as a laborer on a construction crew. Working alongside two Vietnam vets, one suffering from PTSD, Vincent gets the education of a lifetime. Now forty years later, with his own son leaving for college, the lessons of that summer - Vincent’s last taste of innocence and first taste of real life - dramatically unfold in a novel about breaking away, shaping a life, and seeking one’s own destiny.

Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us.

Smoke Jensen looks forward to spending a quiet holiday with the family. But an unexpected arrival from south of the border has him reaching for his guns, defending his land - and risking everything he loves. Sally Jensen strikes up a friendship with a lovely Mexican woman - who turns out to be married to the mysterious stranger plotting to steal her ranch. Ace and Chance prepare to fight a gang of outlaws trying to kill the man who raised them - but they're going to need the help of the father they never knew.

Christmas magic is in the air.... From the ballrooms of London, to abandoned Scottish castles, to the snowy streets of Gilded Age New York, four best-selling authors whip up some unforgettable romance - with a little help from some enchanted shortbread. Included: "Meet Me in Mayfair" by Tessa Dare; "The Duke of Christmas Present" by Sarah MacLean; "Heiress Alone" by Sophie Jordan; and "Christmas in Central Park" by Joanna Shupe.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a 50-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at “The Paper Palace” - the family summer place she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: Last night, Elle and her oldest friend, Jonas, crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love.

I wanted to lose myself in the small town of Pelion, Maine. To forget everything I had left behind. The sound of rain. The blood. The coldness of a gun against my skin. For six months, each breath has been a reminder that I survived—and my dad didn't. I'm almost safe again. But the moment I meet Archer Hale, my entire world tilts on its axis . . . and never rights itself again. Until I trespass into his strange, silent, and isolated world, Archer communicates with no one. Yet in his whiskey-colored eyes, something intangible happens between us.

From the glamorous San Francisco social scene of the 1920s, through war and the social changes of the ’60s, to the rise of Silicon Valley today, this extraordinary novel takes us on a family odyssey that is both heartbreaking and inspiring, as each generation faces the challenges of their day. The Parisian design houses in 1928, the crash of 1929, the losses of war, the drug culture of the 1960s - history holds many surprises, and lives are changed forever.

Like many Overseas Filipino Workers, Mary Grace Concepcion has lived a life of sacrifices. First, she left her husband, Ale, to be a caregiver in Hong Kong. Now, she has travelled even farther, to Canada, in the hopes of one day sponsoring Ale and having children of their own. But when she arrives in Toronto, she must navigate a series of bewildering and careless employers and unruly children.

Katy Hart travels to Los Angeles to testify against the knife-wielding fan who tried to kill her. She is hunted by paparazzi who figure out that she is the mystery woman photographed with Hollywood movie star Dayne Matthews. Tension and pressure build to a dangerous level as Katy and Dayne seek private moments amidst the frenzy. In the end, Dayne's celebrity life makes Katy certain that a future with him is all but impossible.

At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.

She’s got a great job at a VA Hospital, an adorable daughter, and a loving husband. Granted, it would be wonderful if her preschooler wouldn’t wake her up at three in the morning, and it would be a miracle if her husband would change the toilet paper roll once every millennium. Still, in most ways, she has the ideal life she’d always imagined. Then Jane discovers that Dr. Ryan Reilly is the VA’s newest vascular surgeon. Dr. Ryan Reilly, a.k.a. sexy surgeon, a.k.a. the biggest jerk she ever loved.

At 32 Russell Green has it all: a stunning wife, a lovable six-year-old daughter, a successful career as an advertising executive, and an expansive home in Charlotte. He is living the dream, and his marriage to the bewitching Vivian is the center of that. But underneath the shiny surface of this perfect existence, fault lines are beginning to appear, and no one is more surprised than Russ when he finds every aspect of the life he took for granted turned upside down.

Sent on a marketing conference from Sri Lanka to London by her boss, Surya is supposed to be enjoying a change of scene after a tragedy that has left her grief stricken and lost – and compulsively fixated on a long-buried, shameful episode from her past. Finding herself in the same city as the boy she birthed for an English couple seventeen years ago – in exchange for the money that paid her college tuition – Surya is prepared to risk everything for a glimpse of him. Surya promises herself that she will be satisfied with just seeing her boy and knowing that he is safe and well.

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.

C'est l'heure des grandes décisions chez les Lafrance. Alors que les jumeaux célèbrent leur premier anniversaire, un nouvel enfant s'annonce au sein de la famille au moment où Marie-Thérèse rêve d'une vie différente, plus douce, ailleurs. D'autant plus que les bouleversements se multiplient dans la parenté, avec la maladie, les amours compliquées, la lourdeur du quotidien.

Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed.

Natural-born healer Emma Starling once had big plans for her life, but she’s lost her way. A medical school dropout, she’s come back to small-town Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her father, who is dying from a mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating small animals, as well as having visions of the ghost of a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, once known for letting wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some ideas on how to spend his final days.

Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple. For the most part, these differences are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested.