Literary Fiction Family

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood or of manly bonhomie. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life can’t be ignored, however: his tempestuous daughter Katie’s deeply inappropriate boyfriend Ray, for instance, or the sudden appearance of a red circular rash on his hip.

Paddy Clarke is ten years old. Paddy Clarke lights fires. Paddy Clarke's name is written in wet cement all over Barrytown, north Dublin. Paddy Clarke's heroes are Father Damien (and the lepers), Geronimo and George Best. Paddy Clarke has a brother called Francis, but Paddy calls him Sinbad and hates him because that's the rule. Paddy Clarke knows the exact moment to knock a dead scab from his knee.

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove - to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife - "that the hours of his life belong to himself alone". In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears unbidden to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee”, she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her as a sister”. As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.

The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam's life, won't leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender, and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend TJ and his family's bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets—a way to be okay together, maybe for the first time— the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source.

"Ma famille incarne ce que la joie a de plus bruyant, de plus spectaculaire, l'écho inlassable des morts, et le retentissement du désastre. Aujourd'hui, je sais aussi qu'elle illustre, comme tant d'autres familles, le pouvoir de destruction du verbe, et celui du silence."

Chin up, Emily Thorn faces the pain and heartache of love lost and years wasted. At 40, all she has to show for 20 years of marriage is a Federal Express letter from her husband that begins "Dear Emily" - and ends their life together. She had put her own life on hold to pay Ian's way through medical school. She believed him when he told her that one day she'd have everything she ever wanted - children, an education, a career of her own. What she got was overweight, out of shape - and dumped.

Evvie, Maggie, and Topher have known one another since college. Their friendship was something they swore would last forever. Now years have passed, the friends have drifted apart, and they never found the lives they wanted - the lives they dreamed of when they were young and everything seemed possible. Evvie starved herself to become a supermodel but derailed her career by sleeping with a married man. Maggie married Ben, the boy she fell in love with in college, never imagining the heartbreak his drinking would cause.

As the waves crash on to a wild Atlantic beach, Lou is at a crossroads. For the first time ever, just giving up seems like an option. In just one night, at her own 50th birthday, her world has imploded. Her mother has kept a secret hidden all her life. And it changes everything. Before Lou can take another step, she needs to get to the bottom of the shocking truth that alters who she really is. Along with her sister, Toni, who is facing her own crisis, the two women sets out on a life-changing journey.

It is in this house, surrounded by heirloom gardens and the gentle sounds of a river, that Kate Harding, 52, faces her second winter since the untimely death of her husband. Her children, now grown, are living away, and Kate is truly on her own. In her living room are several hatboxes filled with letters and other ghostly ephemera, recently brought by her sister from the attic of their grandparents’ 18th-century Connecticut house. Their sweet mustiness tinges the air and makes Kate dream of her childhood and of her beloved grandparents.

Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few listeners will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.

Bangalore, present day. A young man's close-knit family is nearly destitute when his uncle founds a successful spice company, changing their fortunes overnight. As they move from a cramped, ant-infested shack to a larger house and try to adjust to a new way of life, allegiances realign; marriages are arranged and begin to falter; and conflict brews ominously in the background. Things become "ghachar ghochar" - a nonsense phrase uttered by one of the characters that comes to mean something tangled beyond repair, a knot that can't be untied.

Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant - their very last chance - in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis. But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine.

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

At 40, Lena Baker is at a steady and stable moment in life—between wine nights with her two best friends and her wedding just weeks away, she’s happy in love and in friendship—until a confession on her wedding day shifts her world.

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep - and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town.

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a 19-year-old waitress as his passenger.

Pearl's job is to make people happy. Every day, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness"....

It's December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless - unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father.

Two sisters, one farm. A family is split when their father leaves their shared inheritance entirely to Helen, his younger daughter. Despite baking award-winning pies at the local nursing home, her older sister, Edith, struggles to make what most people would call a living. So she can't help wondering what her life would have been like with even a portion of the farm money her sister kept for herself.