Family Life Fiction

Eighteen months ago, Autumn Divac's husband went missing. Her desperate search has yielded no answers—she still has no idea where he went or why. After being happily married for twenty years, she can't imagine moving forward without him, but for the sake of their two teenage children, she has to try. Autumn takes her kids home for the summer to the charming beachside town where she was raised. She seeks comfort by working alongside her mother and aunt at their bookshop, only to learn that her daughter is facing a life change and her mother has been hiding a terrible secret.

After 27 years of marriage and three children, Anna Oh - wife, mother, outsider artist - has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her success. They plan to wed in the Oh family’s hometown of Three Rivers in Connecticut. But the wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora’s Box of toxic secrets - dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs' lives.

Everyone knows that Addie Fullbright can’t keep a secret. Yet, twelve years ago, as her best friend lay dying, she entrusted Addie with the biggest secret of all. One so shattering that Addie felt she had to leave her hometown of Starlight, Alabama, to keep from revealing a devastating truth to someone she cares for deeply. Now she’s living a lonely life, keeping everyone at a distance. But when her beloved aunt gets a shocking diagnosis and asks her to come back to Starlight to help run the family bakery, Addie knows it’s finally time to go home again.

Oscar-winning actress Ardith Law is a Hollywood icon. Radiant at sixty-two, she is the epitome of glamour and a highly respected artist. But her success has come at a price: she has a strained relationship with her daughter, Morgan, who at thirty-eight still blames Ardith for putting her career before being a mother. Morgan is a successful plastic surgeon in New York City—and the distance from Ardith's Bel Air mansion is not lost on either of them. Ardith became a single mother when Morgan was seven, after her unfaithful husband died in a helicopter accident.

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.

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.

London, 1976. In the thick of a record-breaking heatwave, Gretta Riordan's newly-retired husband has cleaned out his bank account and vanished. Now, for the first time in years, the three Riordan children are converging on their childhood home: Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing; Monica, with two stepdaughters who despise her and an ugly secret that has driven a wedge between her and the little sister she once adored; and Aoife (pronounced EE-fah), the youngest, whose new life in Manhattan is elaborately arranged to conceal her illiteracy.

Nine-year-old Ada has never left her one-room apartment. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada's twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn't waste a minute - she sneaks out to join him. So begins a new adventure of Ada, and for Susan Smith, the woman who is forced to take the two kids in. As Ada teaches herself to ride a pony, learns to read, and watches for German spies, she begins to trust Susan.

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.

Preston and Constance Whittier have built a happy life together, with a brood of six children raised in a beautiful historic Manhattan mansion. Now, with a nearly empty nest, it’s easier than ever for the Whittiers to maintain their tradition of a solo romantic “Wintermoon” ski trip. But with this year’s trip comes tragedy, and suddenly the Whittier’s adult children find themselves reuniting in the family home without their parents for the first time ever. The eldest four are forced to put aside their personal issues and their grief to keep the family together.

Meet the Blunders: Bertie, Betsy, their children, Brutus and Bunny, along with their beloved grandma Old Lady Blunder, and their pet ostrich, Cedric. An ostrich is not a sensible pet, but then the Blunders are not sensible people. This family of upper-class twits live in a crumbling country house named Blunder Hall. When their home comes under threat, they must embark on a series of comic misadventures to save it.

The last in the Afrolit Now series, The Sins of The Fathers by Zukiswa Wanner is narrated by a man dealing with immense grief. When he’s unable to heal from the trauma of loss, Akani begins to question his and his father’s role as a parent and, in doing so, awakens to the patterns between them. In trying to avoid being like his father as a husband and as a parent, did he inadvertently become exactly the man he wished not to be? And what secrets lie untold? As he grieves, he wonders whether he was ill-advised to keep secrets that may unwittingly hurt his family.

Road Ends brings us a family unravelling in the aftermath of tragedy: Edward Cartwright, struggling to escape the legacy of a violent past; Emily, his wife, cloistered in her room with yet another new baby, increasingly unaware of events outside the bedroom door; Tom, their eldest son, 25 years old but home again, unable to come to terms with the death of a friend; and capable, formidable Megan, the sole daughter in a household of eight sons, who for years held the family together but has finally broken free and gone to England, to try to make a life of her own.

Mia Tang is at the top of her game! She's spending winter break with Mom, Lupe, Jason, and Hank in San Francisco's Chinatown! Rich with history and hilarious aunties and uncles, it's the place to find a great story-one she hopes to publish while attending journalism camp at the Tribune. But this trip has as many bumps as the hills of San Francisco . . .

Plymouth, 1941. As sirens blare all around, the Shawbrook family take refuge in a packed shelter. Bombs have already begun to fall through the night sky when they realize their infant son, Freddie, has been forgotten in the rush, left to sleep in his crib. Terrified, Vera, his young mother, races to find him and bring him to safety. The next morning, air-raid warden David Shawbrook returns from his watch to find the shelter pulverized, and his family seemingly all dead. Dirty footprints inside their home betray the looters who have rifled through the house.

Veronique Vincent is a star. At age 22, she is one of the most sought-after models in fashion, gracing the covers of magazines and walking the runways of haute couture shows across the globe. Yet, despite being the consummate professional, Veronique wants little of the glamorous life that modeling affords her.

In this sequel to Paratore's popular The Wedding Planner's Daughter, Bramble's only library is rumored to be closing its doors forever. Willa Havisham just can't let that happen, so she's got to raise money - fast. Plus, she simply has to find a date for the Midwinter Night's Ball. Thankfully, her best friend, Tina, has devised a love compatibility test that might be able to take care of both problems. And before long, Cupid's arrow seems to be hitting the mark all over Bramble.

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.

As Cynthia Wright’s marriage implodes, she is forced to raise her teenage son, Isaiah, alone. The pressure of providing for them through her salon is a full-time job in itself. When Cynthia sees Isaiah pulling away and escaping into video games, tensions rise and prayers feel unanswered. Angry and hurt, Isaiah starts acting like the father who abandoned him, and Cynthia gives him an ultimatum while turning to her twin sister, Elizabeth Jordan, for support. Elizabeth enlists a seasoned prayer warrior who challenges Cynthia to pray boldly and believe God for the impossible.

Midsummer Eve, 1670. Two unexpected visitors arrive at a shabby warehouse on the south side of the River Thames. The first is a wealthy nobleman seeking the lover he deserted 21 years earlier. Now, James Avery has everything to offer: a fortune, a title, and the favor of the newly restored King Charles II. He believes that the warehouse’s poor owner Alinor has the one thing he cannot buy - his son and heir.