Literary Fiction Family

Noah wants to go home. A seemingly easy request from most four-year-olds. But as Noah's single mother, Janie, knows, nothing with Noah is ever easy. One day the preschool office calls and says Janie needs to come in to talk about Noah, and no, not later, now - and life as she knows it stops. For Jerome Anderson, life as he knows it has stopped. A deadly diagnosis has made him realize he is approaching the end of his life.

When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true.

Max Skinner is a man at the heart of London's financial universe until his employers embark on a little asset-stripping of their own. Himself. Amid the grey London drizzle, there is one potential ray of sunshine: Max's Uncle Harry has left him his estate in his will, an eighteenth-century chateau and vineyard an hour's drive from Avignon.

Lee Smith is one of today's most critically acclaimed authors writing about contemporary life in the South. In Family Linen, with a remarkable economy of description and dialogue, Smith sketches eccentric, yet familiar characters moving through a family drama that resonates with both tension and humor.

Mary Lennox, a spoiled, ill-tempered, and unhealthy child, comes to live with her reclusive uncle in Misselthwaite Manor after the death of her parents. With the help of a robin, Mary finds the door to a secret garden, neglected and hidden for years. When she decides to restore the garden in secret, the story becomes a charming journey into the places of the heart, where faith restores health, flowers refresh the spirit, and the magic of the garden brings happiness to Mary.

Thirty-four-year-old Harry Crane works as an analyst for the US Forest Service. When his wife dies suddenly, Harry, despairing, retreats north to lose himself in the remote woods of the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania. But fate intervenes in the form of a fiercely determined young girl named Oriana. She and her mother, Amanda, are struggling to pick up the pieces from their own tragic loss of Oriana’s father. Discovering Harry while roaming the forest, Oriana believes that he holds the key to righting her world.

From the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, and from the horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life's pain and glory. Jack McCall, an American expatriate in Rome with his young daughter, is trying to find some peace after his wife's suicide. But when his sister-in-law begs him to return home, he finds himself drawn into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family's past that can heal his anguished heart.

Meet Charlie Savage: a middle-aged Dubliner with an indefatigable wife, an exasperated daughter, a drinking buddy who’s realized that he’s been a woman all along.... Compiled here for the first time is a whole year’s worth of Roddy Doyle’s hilariousseries for the Irish Independent. Giving a unique voice to the everyday, he draws a portrait of a man - funny, loyal, somewhat bewildered - trying to keep pace with the modern world (if his knees don’t give out first)

With Nero Wolfe on the job, you'd think murderers would take caution. But even the master detective can't stop a killing, especially if it's an inside job - right under the roof of his client, millionaire Otis Jarrell. What's more, it's Jarrell's own missing revolver that the killer uses. Wolfe must find the truth behind the scandals in Jarrell's ill-behaved family. One of its members sleeps the fitful sleep of the guilty, and Wolfe's getting dead tired of murder.

Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are eight years old when they meet late one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she's intrigued by the boy who shows up all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy's taken back to the emergency room and Rachel's sent back to her bed, they think they'll never see each other again.

A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythic Lake Noir. They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires, a mass murderer, a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God, a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a chicken scratch.

We all live like we’re famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation.

Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her finely sighted eye for the frailties of human behavior and her finely tuned ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.

Josie and her children's father have split up, she's been sued by a former patient and lost her dental practice, and she's grieving the death of a young man senselessly killed. When her ex asks to take the children to meet his new fiancée's family, Josie makes a run for it, figuring Alaska is about as far as she can get without a passport. Josie and her kids, Paul and Ana, rent a rattling old RV named the Chateau, and at first their trip feels like a vacation.

“Florida, we got it all. Motor sports, ribs, beer. You can drive on the sand right on up to the ocean. Fireworks every night.” That's how twelve-year-old C.C.’s father, who named her after his beloved Canadian Club whiskey, describes the appeal of their new home. The man is a born grifter, a used-car salesman who burned down his dealership in southern Ohio for enough insurance money to set up a life for himself, his wife, and his two young daughters in a place he picked largely at random, because the living seemed easy.

The trip of a lifetime! Rosie Lewis has her life together. A swanky job as a Michelin-starred sous chef, a loving husband and future children scheduled for exactly January 2021. That’s until she comes home one day to find her husband’s prepacked bag and a confession that he's had an affair. Heartbroken and devastated, Rosie drowns her sorrows in a glass (or three) of wine, only to discover the following morning that she has spontaneously invested in a bright pink campervan to facilitate her grand plans to travel the country.

Bo Mason, his wife, and his two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks his fortune in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running throughout the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest.

At an intimate, festive dinner party in Seattle, six women gather to celebrate their friend Kate's recovery from cancer. Wineglass in hand, Kate strikes a bargain with them. To celebrate her new lease on life, she'll do the one thing that's always terrified her: white-water rafting. But if she goes, all of them will also do something they always swore they'd never do-and Kate is going to choose their adventures.

Dover, Massachusetts, 1969. Ginny Richardson's heart was torn open when her baby girl, Lucy, born with Down syndrome, was taken from her. Under pressure from his powerful family, her husband, Ab, sent Lucy away to Willowridge, a special school for the "feeble-minded". Ab tried to convince Ginny it was for the best. But two years later, when Ginny's best friend, Marsha, shows her a series of articles exposing Willowridge as a hell-on-earth - its squalid hallways filled with neglected children - she knows she can't leave her daughter there.

When a home aide arrives to assist a rambunctious family at a crossroads, simmering tensions boil over in this “witty, exuberant debut” (People) that is an “absolute delight from start to finish” (Sarah Haywood, New York Times best-selling author) perfect for fans of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Evvie Drake Starts Over.