Family Humor

An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.

It’s almost Christmas and Bunny McGarry is not in the festive spirit. His mood is not improved when an old friend becomes the victim of a violent assault and, for reasons he can’t understand, the police force he is a member of has decided not to investigate. Getting to the bottom of the case ends up putting him on the wrong side of some powerful people.

On the eve of her wedding to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia, Rachel should be over the moon. She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond from JAR, a wedding dress she loves more than anything found in the salons of Paris, and a fiancé willing to sacrifice his entire inheritance in order to marry her. But Rachel still mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won't be able to walk her down the aisle.

In the remarkable, bizarre, and heart-wrenching summer before Cullen Witter’s senior year of high school, he is forced to examine everything he thinks he understands about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town. His cousin overdoses; his town becomes absurdly obsessed with the alleged reappearance of an extinct woodpecker; and most troubling of all, his sensitive, gifted fifteen-year-old brother, Gabriel, suddenly and inexplicably disappears.

Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures of her dinner to Instagram when she should be mourning her “missing” boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit. Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works.

When Milan Patel, a high-end event planner in New York City, visits his parents at their family-run motel in Montana, he’s already expecting the usual drama. But shortly after he arrives, Milan’s father mysteriously drowns in the motel pool. Now everyone’s a suspect. What was meant to be a quick trip becomes Milan’s worst nightmare: reconnecting with his past so he can solve his father’s murder.

When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside—but he's not alone. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch’s massive fortune. With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park—a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore—Nicholas’s childhood home turns into a hotbed of speculation and sabotage.

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband, Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,” she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped.

Five years ago, Geeta lost her no-good husband. As in, she actually lost him—he walked out on her and she has no idea where he is. But in her remote village in India, rumor has it that Geeta killed him. And it’s a rumor that just won’t die.

Lark Smith has always had a plan for her life: find a fantastic guy, create a marriage as blissful as her parents’, pop out a couple of kids, and build a rewarding career as an oncologist. Things aren’t going so well. For one, the guy didn’t work out. Theoretically, she’d love to find someone else, but it hasn’t happened. Two, she’s just been transferred out of Oncology for being too emotional. (Is it her fault she’s a weeper?) Three, her parents just split up. Deviating from the plan was … well, not in the plan. A potential solution comes from the foul-tempered surgeon Lorenzo Santini.

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

Jane and Dan have been married for nineteen years, but Jane isn’t sure they’re going to make it to twenty. The mother of two feels unneeded by her teenagers, and her writing career has screeched to an unsuccessful halt. Her one published novel sold under five hundred copies. Worse? She’s pretty sure Dan is cheating on her. When the couple goes to the renowned upscale restaurant La Fin du Monde to celebrate their anniversary, Jane thinks it’s as good a place as any to tell Dan she wants a divorce.

Patrick O’Hara is back. It’s been five years since his summer as his niece Maisie and nephew Grant’s caretaker after their mother’s passing. The kids are back in Connecticut with their dad, and Patrick has relocated to New York to remain close by and relaunch his dormant acting career. After the run of his second successful sit-com comes to a close, Patrick feels on top of the world . . . professionally. But some things have had to take a back seat. Looking down both barrels at fifty, Patrick is single again after breaking things off with Emory.

They're a glamorous family, the Caseys. Johnny Casey, his two brothers Ed and Liam, their beautiful, talented wives and all their kids spend a lot of time together - birthday parties, anniversary celebrations, weekends away. And they're a happy family. Johnny's wife, Jessie - who has the most money - insists on it. Under the surface, though, conditions are murkier. While some people clash, other people like each other far too much.... Everything stays under control until Ed's wife Cara, gets concussion and can't keep her thoughts to herself.

Romance writer Penelope Banks can write the perfect love story, but when it comes to family, all she’s got is a rough draft. Penny shelved the idea of fitting in with her high-achieving family years ago, but when her new business venture—a romance bookstore—is at risk of closing before its doors have opened, she’s forced to ask for help from the one place she never expected. Home.

Jack McMaster seemingly has it all. A beautiful house, a loving son of many talents (including cooking, which is great news for Jack, if not for his waistline), even a special bond with his buddies in his ball hockey league. But he’s also learning to live with loss, leaving a gaping hole in his life—a life that will never be the same as before. Jack passes his days knowing he has the support of his family and his friends, but he can’t shake the feeling that his life has gone gray, and that time is passing so quickly.

Lucy Sullivan is 26 and living it up (and occasionally down) in London. Hers is a life of quiet, undisciplined desperation. But when she and three friends visit a psychic for a bit of fun and the woman's predictions start coming true, Lucy is horrified. For the fortune-teller insisted she'd soon be married - within the year, in fact. Not only does Lucy not have a boyfriend, but the chances of getting one are looking slim. Between the bottles of wine, antidepressants and her addiction to self-help books, she's not quite ready to walk, or even stumble, down the aisle sober.

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government, a pacifist who carries a gun, a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy, a cyberwhiz who hates computers, a robust bon vivant who can be as squeamish as any fop, a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol.

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.

“Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing. A more disrespectful, trash talking woman was not to be found.” So began Andy Corren's unforgettable obituary for his mother, Renay Mandel Corren, in her hometown paper The Fayetteville Observer, a tribute that went on to touch the hearts of millions around the globe. In his brief telling of the life and legend that was Renay, Andy captured only a slice of his loving and fabulously unconventional mother.