Home Fiction

Can you fall in love while operators are standing by? Kevin’s a widower doctor with a precocious 12-year-old. He’s just met Mary, his daughter’s substitute teacher, who is experiencing her first Christmas without her beloved mother. As the holiday season ramps up, the twosome is unaware they’re also both in hot pursuit of a limited edition poinsettia angel being sold on their favorite television shopping channel.

The Cisco triplets are appalled by their widowed father's behavior. He seems to care more about his gold-digging fiancee than he does about his own son and daughters. Even worse, Dad put their spunky grandmother - head of the family candy company--in a nursing home against her will. Setting out to spring Granny Cisco, college seniors Sara, Hannah, and Sam soon prove that trouble comes in threes....

Against all odds, Morgan Carter and his family have endured despite the deteriorating conditions surrounding them. Armed with survivalist tactics, Morgan's crew, alongside their new friends from the recently-liberated DHS camp, have worked together to build a sustainable community. But not all situations can be prepared for. When a massive wildfire threatens their very existence, they must decide: fight or flight?

From a remote corner of the galaxy, a message is being sent. The continuous beats of a pulsar have become odd, irregular, and artificial. It can only be a code. Frantically, a research team struggles to decipher the alien communication. And what the scientists discover is destined to shake the foundations of empires around this world - from Wall Street to the Vatican.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

From one of Fine Homebuilding's best-loved authors, Larry Haun, comes a unique story that looks at American home building from the perspective of twelve houses he has known intimately. Part memoir, part cultural history, A Carpenter's Life as Told by Houses takes the reader house by house over an arc of 100 years.

Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city—and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.

Morgan has managed to get through a lot. Having made it back to his family and dealt with the issues of unscrupulous neighbors, he then had to deal with the presence of the federal government and their nefarious activities. But with the help of his close-knit group he prevailed. Life is settling into a familiar routine. And with the help of the US Army, they are starting to rebuild their community. But just when Morgan thinks things are assuming some kind of normal, another surprise lands in his lap.

It is 1916, and Roberta Jewett is surprised to find that her hometown of Camden, Maine, considers a divorced woman little more than a prostitute. Condemned by her mother and scorned by neighbors, she nonetheless perseveres in her struggle to forge a good life for her girls and herself. Embittered by her painful marriage to an unfaithful husband, she has no intention of being any man's victim again. So Roberta is taken aback to find the widowed carpenter Gabriel Farley has somehow found his way into her heart.

From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself - and us - home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America - and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman. Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.

Freedom fighter, brilliant businessperson, devoted wife, master of languages, and ultimately, savior of a European dynasty. Claudia Patterson would become all of these—spurred on by the fiercely powerful loves and losses along the way … Denny Clark. An abused thirteen-year-old White boy whose life twelve-year-old Claudia saves—complicating her own life for years to come.

Morgan and Eli, two Indigenous children forced away from their families and communities, are brought together in a foster home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They each feel disconnected, from their culture and each other, and struggle to fit in at school and at their new home—until they find a secret place, walled off in an unfinished attic bedroom. A portal opens to another reality, Askí, bringing them onto frozen, barren grounds, where they meet Ochek (Fisher).

For ex-Wall Streeter Jacobia Jake Tiptree and her teenage son, Sam, September promises tranquil days winter-proofing their rambling handyman's special of a home in Eastport, Maine. But there's nothing idyllic about this Down East autumn. For starters, the return of truly vicious native son Reuben Tate stirs up the town. And when somebody slits Reuben's throat and hangs his corpse on the cemetery gate, the police trace a bloodied scalpel to surgeon Victor Tiptree - Jake's former husband.

Jacobia Tiptree and her teenage son are used to their Eastport, Maine, home attracting more than its share of houseguests. This year Jake is hoping the plaster dust will keep them away while she finally gets her gem of a fixer-upper into shape - from doorknobs and chandeliers to ghostly phenomena... But when the charming and mysterious Jonathan Raines appears on her doorstep and then just as suddenly disappears, remodeling the house becomes the least of Jake's problems.

At this stately home, now open for public tours, visitors revel in the lush atmosphere created by its three hundred rooms, its exceptional display of fine china, its chilling dungeon with historic suits of armor on display, evoking the spirits of knights from a forgotten age. Young Michael's sister, a visitor to the mansion with their mum, presses her for an explanation of "what's a chastity belt?" while Michael fools around with one of the suits of armor....

Set against the backdrop of an elegant Cornwall mansion before World War II and a vast continent-spanning canvas during the turbulent war years, this captivating story tells of an extraordinary young woman's coming of age, coming to grips with love and sadness, and in every sense of the term, coming home.... In 1935, Judith Dunbar is left behind at a British boarding school when her mother and baby sister go off to join her father in Singapore.

Georgina Carlton is on the fast-track road to success. She doesn't have time for distractions like relationships, family, and love because she's seen firsthand how they can complicate things. Unfortunately, Max Hayes didn't get that memo. One look at the petite dynamo and he decides she's a complication worth having and keeping. So he erases the boundary lines when she's not looking, and before Georgina knows it, she's falling in love with the gorgeous farmer and a town she thought she hated. Can she take a chance on him, or will her dream and complicated past get in the way?

The setting is the beginning of an Amish settlement in colonial America in the forests of eastern Pennsylvania. There, a young Amish couple, Hans and Kate Zug, are in their ninth year of marriage, still waiting to have a child. Then, one April morning, Kate finds a Native infant, wrapped in deerskin and placed next to the spring where she went to fill her water bucket.

Maddie Townsend might live in a town called Serenity, but there's been nothing calm or peaceful about her life since her marriage broke up. This stay-at-home mom has no job skills, an out-of-control 16-year-old son, a talkative 14-year-old who's suddenly gone silent, a six-year-old daughter whose heart is broken, an ex-husband whose younger girlfriend is expecting their baby, and two best friends who think she's somehow qualified to help them open a fitness spa for women.

While her parents attend a work party, eighteen-year-old Ella Romero is left in charge of her two siblings—thirteen-year-old Nicholas and eight-year-old Arianna—at their secluded lake house. In her usual fashion, Ella invites her friends to hang out while her parents are away, too. It was supposed to be an easy, quiet, normal night.