Family Life Fiction

Ellen is putting the finishing touches on her granddaughter June's wedding quilt - made from scraps of old dresses, both remembered and forgotten - when June breaks off her engagement and seeks sanctuary at her grandparents' ranch. June's fiance is set to go off to fight in Korea as soon as they're married, but the young bride doesn't think she can go through with it.

When the Tooting family finds an old engine and fits it to their camper van, they have no idea what kind of adventure lies ahead. The engine used to belong to an extraordinary car, and it wants its bodywork back! But as the Tootings hurtle across the world rebuilding the original Chitty, a sinister baddie is on their trail - one who will stop at nothing to get the magnificent car for himself.

In this irresistible novel from the author of Then She Was Gone, Jem and Ralph discover the power of starting over after 11 years together have left them drifting apart.

A taste of her own medicine. George is alone in the house with Grandma. The most horrid, grizzly old grunion of a grandma ever. She needs something stronger than her usual medicine to cure her grouchiness. A special grandma medicine, a remedy for everything. And George knows just what to put into it. Grandma's in for the surprise of her life - and so is George, when he sees the results of his mixture!

After being set adrift at sea, baby Mordred is found by fisherfolk who raise him as their own. One day, a beautiful, magical lady appears to carry him back to his birth-mother's cold castle. There, alone but for his faithful dog, he comes of age and learns the horrible truth about his identity. Everyone knows Mordred as the dark, evil son who kills the noble King Arthur. But what would it be like to be born as Mordred, an unwanted child with a dreadful destiny?

Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a wayward path: She is Shuggie’s guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good - her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor.

This volume includes: Benny Uncovers a Mystery, The Haunted Cabin Mystery, and The Deserted Library Mystery. In The Haunted Cabin Mystery, the Aldens are going with grandfather to visit his friend, old Cap Lambert, a retired riverboat pilot who lives in a cabin in the woods. To get there, the Boxcar Children take a wonderful trip down the Mississippi in a paddlewheel boat. But when they arrive at Cap Lambert’s cabin, they find some mysterious things are going on. Spooky phone calls, eerie flickering lights, strange dark figures. Is the cabin haunted?

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero. Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do—she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.

As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire.

When a simple mix-up leaves their father Joe’s estate to Eden, their long-absent mother, Clare and Aaron decide it’s finally time to track Eden down. But it’s been over thirty years since she left their remote outback mining town, and they’ve never heard from her again. Aaron is dealing with a new marriage that’s currently trapped in immigration limbo, and his teenage daughter Cady is clearly going through a personal crisis of her own.

The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born in five generations of Rares. As a child in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, she is drawn to Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a gift for healing. Dora becomes Miss B.’s apprentice, and together they help the women of Scots Bay through infertility, difficult labours, breech births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling sex lives.

Bhima, the unforgettable main character of Thrity Umrigar’s beloved national best seller, The Space Between Us, returns in this triumphant sequel - a poignant and compelling novel in which the former servant struggles against the circumstances of class and misfortune to forge a new path for herself and her granddaughter in modern India. Poor and illiterate, Bhima had faithfully worked for the Dubash family, an upper-middle-class Parsi household, for more than 20 years.

For Vito Corleone, nothing is more important than his family's future. While his youngest children, Michael, Fredo, and Connie, are in school, unaware of their father's true occupation, and his adopted son Tom Hagen is a college student, he worries most about Sonny, his eldest child. Vito pushes Sonny to be a businessman, but Sonny - 17 years old, impatient, and reckless - wants something else: To follow in his father's footsteps and become a part of the real family business.

Immerse yourself in a land of bomnubbles and quarreling cousins, sea dragons and book publishers, thieves and Fangs and secret maps. Inside this book lie seven stories of the distant past, lost adventures, forgotten songs, and heartbreaking histories. The Shining Isle is restored, but Aerwiar is vast - and these authors have tales yet to tell.

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.

Barry Laverty, M.B., can barely find the village of Ballybucklebo on a map when he first sets out to seek gainful employment there, but already he knows that there is nowhere he would rather live than in the emerald hills and dales of Northern Ireland. The proud owner of a spanking-new medical degree and little else in the way of worldly possessions, Barry jumps at the chance to secure a position as an assistant in a small rural practice. At least until he meets Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly.

The Vanderbeekers have always lived in the brownstone on 141st Street. It's practically another member of the family. So when their reclusive, curmudgeonly landlord decides not to renew their lease, the five siblings have 11 days to do whatever it takes to stay in their beloved home and convince the dreaded Beiderman just how wonderful they are. And all is fair in love and war when it comes to keeping their home. A modern classic in the making reminiscent of the Penderwicks series.

Kit McMahon lives in the small Irish town of Lough Glass, a place where nothing changes - until the day Kit's mother disappears and Kit is haunted by the memory of her mother, alone at the kitchen table, tears streaming down her face. Now Kit, too, has secrets: of the night she discovered a letter and burned it, unopened. The night her mother was lost. The night everything changed forever....

At 38 and a quarter years old, Paris native Camille has everything she needs to be happy, or so it seems: a good job, a loving husband, a wonderful son. Why, then, does she feel as if happiness has slipped through her fingers? All she wants is to find the path to joy. When Claude, a French Sean Connery lookalike and routinologist, offers his unique advice to help get her there, she seizes the opportunity with both hands.

This is the story of Despereaux Tilling, a mouse in love with music, stories, and a princess named Pea. It is also the story of a rat called Roscuro, who lives in darkness but covets a world filled with light. And it is the story of Miggery Sow, a slow-witted serving girl with a simple, impossible wish. These characters are about to embark on a journey that will lead them down into a horrible dungeon, up into a glittering castle, and ultimately, into each other's lives.