Family Life Fiction

This is a collection of four linked stories about family life set in modern west Africa. Anna Hibiscus lives in amazing Africa with her family in a wonderful house in a beautiful garden in a big city. Join Anna as she sings for the president, gets in a terrible tangle with her hair, and visits the other side of the city.

Inspired by a near-mythic event on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the 20th century, Shadow Country re-imagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.

In this series opener, listeners meet Jack and his foster siblings, Ava and Matt, who are orphans. But they're not your typical kind of orphans - they're geniuses. Well, Ava and Matt are, which sometimes makes life difficult for 12-year-old Jack. Ava speaks multiple languages and builds robots for fun, and Matt is into astronomy and a whiz at math. As for Jack, it's hard to stand out when he's surrounded by geniuses all the time.

A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent children. They are charming, and resourceful, and have pleasant facial features. Unfortunately, they are exceptionally unlucky. In the first two books alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, a lumpy bed, a deadly serpent, a large brass reading lamp, a long knife, and a terrible odor.

Kwan Wilson was a high school basketball star living in San Diego when a tragic accident changed his life in ways no one could predict. He only looked at his phone for a few seconds, but that was all the time it took to crash his car into a telephone pole, killing his mother and paralyzing him from the waist down. After the accident, his father, Admiral Douglas Wilson, sent him off to live with his maternal grandmother in South Florida.

Daring mission or deadly mistake? Winter has been a disappointment to his royal IceWing family his whole life. When his sister, Icicle, runs away from Jade Mountain Academy, fleeing terrible crimes and possibly planning to commit more, Winter knows that they both need a second chance to make things right - if only he can find her.

It's 1924 in Branchville, South Carolina, and three women have come to a crossroads. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters. Retta, a first-generation freed slave, comes to Gertrude's aid by watching her children, despite the gossip it causes in her community. Annie, the matriarch of the influential Coles family, offers Gertrude employment at her sewing circle, while facing problems of her own at home.

After her parents perish in a tragic accident, Cosima Saverio assumes leadership of her family's haute couture Italian leather brand. While navigating the challenges of running a company at twenty-three, Cosima must also maintain the four-hundred-year-old family palazzo in Venice and care for her younger siblings. Cosima navigates her personal and professional challenges with a wisdom beyond her years, but her success has come at a cost: Her needs are always secondary. She's married to the business, and her free time is given to those who rely on her . . . until she meets Olivier Bayard.

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself; his wife, Neni; and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty - and Jende is eager to please. Clark's wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses' summer home in the Hamptons.

Seventh-grader Zoey has her hands full as she takes care of her much younger siblings after school every day while her mom works her shift at the pizza parlor. Not that her mom seems to appreciate it. At least there's Lenny, her mom's boyfriend - they all get to live in his nice, clean trailer. At school, Zoey tries to stay under the radar. Her only friend, Fuchsia, has her own issues, and since they're in an entirely different world than the rich kids, it's best if no one notices them. Zoey thinks how much easier everything would be if she were an octopus.

An historic literary event: the publication of a newly discovered novel, the earliest known work from Harper Lee, the beloved, best-selling author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014.

At Christmastime, a family of three are missing someone dear to them. Until unexpected guests begin to arrive at their empty house, filling it with Christmas memories in the making.

Crystal Malloy owns the beauty salon in Mystic Creek, Oregon. It took years of work to stand on her own after a difficult upbringing and to turn her fledgling enterprise into a successful business. There's never been much time for romance, but when a handsome, friendly man stops in to her salon - he's traveling through town on business - she's immediately taken with him.

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.

Andrew Montgomery is the black sheep of the Montgomery family. Seventeen years ago, Andy and his best friend, Kurt, took off for the army and planned to never look back. Once overseas, they realized the depths of their mistake. But once Kurt died in combat, Andy decided to turn his back on his past for good. Years later, Andrew is bound to the US again with an injury. A phone call a few weeks before Christmas changes everything and beckons him home. His father has been involved in a horrible car accident. When Andrew returns to the island, he finds himself in the center of so many ghosts.

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's a hot, hot summer, and in the depths of the Toronto Transit Authority's Lost and Found, 17-year-old Duncan is cataloging lost things and sifting through accumulated junk. And between Jacob, the cranky old man who runs the place, and the endless dusty boxes overflowing with stuff no one will ever claim, Duncan's just about had enough. Then he finds a little leather book. It's a diary filled with the dark and dirty secrets of a twisted mind, a serial killer stalking his prey in the subway. And Duncan can't make himself stop reading.

Wyatt Fitzgerald doesn't consider his deafness a disability, and he doesn't want special consideration from anyone - least of all a spoiled city girl like Erin. He prides himself on his ability to read lips, and when she confronts him, Wyatt sees no reason to volunteer to her that he's deaf. But there's no escaping each other in the small Oregon town, especially once Erin seeks him out to make amends. Wyatt gave up on dating long ago, but the written correspondence he and Erin begin to share speak to him like nothing else ever has.

Baseball is in the Schneider family blood. Each member of this family, from family founder Felix Schneider in the 1800s to Snider Flint in the present day, has a strong tie to the game and to Brooklyn. Through the years, this family has dodged bullets on a battlefield, pitched perfect games, and dealt with the devastating loss of family and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Nine innings - nine generations. One game - one family. Through it all, one thing remains true: The bonds of family are as strong as a love of the game.