Family Humor

Newly orphaned, recently divorced, and semiadrift, Nina Popkin is on a search for her birth mother. She's spent her life looking into strangers' faces, fantasizing they're related to her, and now, at thirty-five, she's ready for answers. Meanwhile, the last thing Lindy McIntyre wants is someone like Nina bursting into her life, announcing that they're sisters and campaigning to track down their mother. She's too busy with her successful salon, three children, beautiful home, and...oh yes, some pesky little anxiety attacks.

The Cheeseman family is back from back in time. In other words, they're in the present time. Well, presently, at least. They're soon to journey back again - only just a few years this time - to save the life of their beloved mother. But when they get to the not-so-distant-past, they meet something utterly surprising. Something wilder than anything they've seen before - including cowboy poets and good-natured pirates. They are about to meet...the alternate versions of themselves!

On the night of a massive hurricane, three estranged siblings learn that their father is dying. For the first time in years, they convene at their childhood home in Upstate New York, where the storm has downed power lines, flooded houses, and destroyed the family's antique store. The Westfalls are no strangers to dysfunction. But never have their lives felt so out of control.

After eight and a half years and 323 pageants, Miranda Miller has become the ultimate stage mother. Her mission in life is to see that her nine-year-old daughter, Bailey, continues to be one of the most successful child pageant contestants in the southern United States. Lately, though, that mission has become increasingly difficult. Bailey wants to retire and has been secretly binge eating to make herself "unpageantable". But Miranda has a plan.

James Orr - husband, father, reliable employee and all-around model citizen - awakes one morning to find half his face paralyzed. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he stops going to work and wanders his idyllic estate, with its woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James himself may not be the man he thought he was.

Priced out of their Manhattan neighborhood, Jessica and Aaron move with their young daughters to the one place Jessica swore she'd never go: the suburbs. But to Jessica's surprise, life in the commuter belt makes a great first impression. She quickly falls in with a clique of helpful mom friends, and she's thrilled when she's invited to a moms-only weekend at the beach. The trip turns into a series of eye-opening lessons, and Jessica must decide if she's strong enough to be honest with herself about the sort of life she really wants.

In the colorful small town of Cherico, Mississippi, librarian Maura Beth McShay is preparing for an exciting new installment in her own life story - with some help from the Cherry Cola Book Club. Overseeing the opening of Cherico's new library has been a labor of love for Maura Beth McShay, made extra challenging by the fact that she and Jeremy are expecting their first child. And there's another plot twist on the horizon: Jeremy's sister, Elise, has taken a sabbatical to have a baby and will be staying in Cherico during her pregnancy.

Sam Bennett is the last of a dying breed, a former Mad Man, now made redundant after 30 years at the same advertising agency. Left with his awards and a case of Bulgarian whiskey (which he still can’t remember buying), Sam retreats to his home, awaits the summer arrival of his daughter and crazy son-in-law, Muller, is plagued by panic attacks and has an incident involving a pressed ham on a liquor store window with a young security guard named Max. .

Kids, a Primer is a collection of a grandfather's musings on the way his (now grown) children are raising their children and being glad about being a grandparent rather than a new parent with young children (again). While Ungar is convinced that grandparents could do a better job raising children if they had the energy, he is grateful that he, in fact, no longer has the energy.

Lil Olive, the leader of a group of feisty elderly women, decides that she is restless at the Rosehaven nursing home. Lil and her friends need some excitement in their dull lives. So, the group of women steal a car and hit the road in search of adventures, which include hilariously unforgettable trips to the local CVS and Hardee's, and end with an encounter with the law.

An Na has earned critical raves for her young adult fiction. She has won the Michael L. Printz Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In The Fold, she examines the complications surrounding teenage plastic surgery. Joyce is thrilled when her aunt becomes suddenly wealthy. But when her aunt decides Joyce needs a makeover, Joyce must decide if she is ready to go under the knife to become the popular swan she's always wanted to be.

After 68-year-old David Granger crashes his BMW, medical tests reveal a brain tumor that he readily attributes to his wartime Agent Orange exposure. He wakes up from surgery repeating a name no one in his civilian life has ever heard - that of a Native American soldier whom he was once ordered to discipline. David decides to return something precious he long ago stole from the man he now calls Clayton Fire Bear.

Watch out, parents! Hilarious jokes are coming your way! This kid’s joke book will turn your nine-year-old into a young comedian. The You Laugh You Lose Challenge is a book designed for both single-player and to be shared and read by everyone in your household. But why not let everyone play? Gather your family around the fire, call them into the kitchen, meet on the patio, and let the good times roll!

Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are eight years old when they meet late one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she's intrigued by the boy who shows up all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy's taken back to the emergency room and Rachel's sent back to her bed, they think they'll never see each other again.

When novelist Mia Gladwell attempts to reinvent herself by moving into the house of a famous writer, she discovers that life there is not what she expected.

Awarded a three-month stipend to travel and work, a Swedish writer flies to Madrid, where in a bar she meets a man with an extraordinary story to tell. In exchange for somewhere to sleep and to hide out for a few days, he is willing to tell her the whole astonishing tale. What follows is an account of fantastic proportions and ingredients: the existence of a shadowy Internet TV show with a certain morality clause, a threat to the storyteller's life, a diabolical nun, and the story of a girl with a missing left thumb.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle - and people in general - has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands.

When a home aide arrives to assist a rambunctious family at a crossroads, simmering tensions boil over in this “witty, exuberant debut” (People) that is an “absolute delight from start to finish” (Sarah Haywood, New York Times best-selling author) perfect for fans of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Evvie Drake Starts Over.

At any given moment in other people's houses, you can find...repressed hopes and dreams...moments of unexpected joy...someone making love on the floor to a man who is most definitely not her husband.... As the longtime local carpool mom, Frances Bloom is sometimes an unwilling witness to her neighbors' private lives. She knows her cousin is hiding her desire for another baby from her spouse, Bill Horton's wife is mysteriously missing, and now this....

Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to lives of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.