Saga American Family

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.

Ever since running away at the age of fourteen, Paul-Edward, the son of a white landowner and a black slave, has had one dream: to own land every bit as good as his daddy's. While growing up, Paul-Edward loved, and feared, his father, but he loved the land unconditionally. Then, after a rash act of youthful rebellion, he leaves his family behind and vows to succeed on his own. However, for anyone black coming of age in 1880's Mississippi, this is no simple goal.

While exploring World’s End, an area in Aski they've just discovered, Morgan and Emily delight in their developing relationship, while Eli struggles to understand his new-found power: the ability to locate a portal. A shocking turn of events leads them to a new village, Ministik, where the animal beings who live there are going missing. Horrified to discover who is responsible, the children vow to help and turn to friends, old and new. But it's getting harder and harder to keep the two worlds separate, especially when details of a traditional legend change everything. Forever.

Shanghai, 1912. Violet Minturn is the privileged daughter of the American madam of the city's most exclusive courtesan house. But when the Ching dynasty is overturned, Violet is separated from her mother in a cruel act of chicanery and forced to become a "virgin courtesan." Half-Chinese and half-American, Violet grapples with her place in the worlds of East and West - until she is able to merge her two halves, empowering her to become a shrewd courtesan who excels in the business of seduction and illusion, though she still struggles to understand who she is.

She's smart, gorgeous, and mysterious. For business executive Nathan Carver, a man with everything, Jessica Bolton is the first woman he can't simply charm, buy, or seduce. And even before Jessica gets a taste of his luxurious lifestyle and irresistible moves, she's determined to eliminate the competition and become this handsome bachelor's one and only. But Jessica's deceptive allure is just the beginning.

Two years ago, a freak weather event covered the Earth in ice, and temperatures plunged below freezing. Jarred, Fiona, and their fellow survivors thought they had found a safe haven in an underground cave system. But when a series of earthquakes destroys their home, they’re forced to flee their place of refuge… Jarred and Fiona are determined to keep everyone safe… But the world has only grown more dangerous since the new ice age began. And despite Jarred’s best intentions, his daughter, Hope, struggles against her father’s over-protectiveness.

Disappearing Moon Café was a stunning debut novel that has become a Canadian literary classic. An unflinchingly honest portrait of a Chinese-Canadian family that pulses with life and moral tensions, this family saga takes the listener from the wilderness in 19th-century British Columbia to late 20th-century Hong Kong, to Vancouver's Chinatown. Intricate and lyrical, suspenseful and emotionally rich, it is a riveting story of four generations of women whose lives are haunted by the secrets and lies of their ancestors.

To keep their family ties strong, the five Reeves sisters meet regularly to give each other a reality check. But explosive family secrets begin to pour out like molten lava and forever change all they treasure most.

Set in California's lush Napa Valley and spanning four generations of a talented and visionary family, The House of Mondavi is a tale of genius, sibling rivalry, and betrayal. From 1906, when Italian immigrant Cesare Mondavi passed through Ellis Island, to the Robert Mondavi Corporation's 21st-century battle over a billion-dollar fortune, award-winning journalist Julia Flynn Siler brings to life both the place and the people in this riveting family drama.

Iranian-American multimillionaires Ali and Homa Milani have it all—a McMansion in the hills of Los Angeles, a microwaveable snack empire, and four spirited daughters. There’s Violet, the big-hearted aspiring model; Roxanna, the chaotic influencer; Mina, the chronically-online overachiever; and the impressionable health fanatic Haylee. On the verge of landing their own reality TV show, the Milanis realize their deepest secrets are about to be dragged out into the open before the cameras even roll.

In 1916, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the post-Civil War South for the “Promised Land” of the North. But soon they learn that even in Vauxhall, New Jersey, black women are mainly hired for domestic work, money is scarce, children don’t progress in school, and black men die young. Within a few short years, both women’s husbands are dead. Left to navigate this unwelcoming place alone, Celia and Lucy turn to one another for support in raising their children far from home.

The Road Home lies in the shadows of Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee; it is etched into the landscape of an old man’s memory and into the stubborn dreams of a young man’s heart. In one of Jim Harrison’s greatest works, five members of the Northridge family narrate the tangled epic of their history on the expanses of the Nebraska plains. They strive to understand their fates, to reconcile with demons of the past, to live in accordance with the land, and to die with grace.

I Am Liu Yuejin, by prize-winning Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, is a novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption. The protagonist, Liu Yuejin, is a work site cook and small-time thief whose bag is stolen. While searching for it, he stumbles upon another bag, which contains a flash disk that chronicles high-level corruption, and sets off a convoluted chase.

Jakari Bolton: protector and provider… He takes on those roles when his father gets incarcerated for hideous crimes that are still bothering him ten years later. Jakari is so busy taking care of those he loves he forgot that he needed care too. Anger, guilt, and hurt have guided his life’s trajectory, and he doesn’t know any other way to be. So when he has to pick up his cousins from school and runs into librarian, Yendi Odom, he doesn’t know how to handle her.

The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.

Professional basketball player Nate Guillory has a good life. He enjoyed his childhood as the only child in a single-parent home. There is only one thing he feels he missed out on: knowing his father. Although he had a great upbringing, he feels that it is his right to know the identity of his father and why they weren’t afforded the opportunity to have a relationship. Because his mother isn’t as forthcoming with information, Nate seeks out rapper, Noah Brooks, who is the bonus son of his now deceased father.

The son of Maya Angelou, Guy Johnson is a critically acclaimed author and poet in his own right. Echoes of a Distant Summer is the story of Jackson St. Clair Tremain, a San Francisco civil servant who thought he had left his old life far behind. In 1982, Jackson is summoned to Mexico to confer with his dying grandfather, the brutal hustler King Tremain. When King dies, Jackson inherits $50 million - and the unwanted attentions of a malevolent bayou crime lord named Pug DuMont.

In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, 10-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: Her father promises to return home and collect her by her 12th birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.

Time travel, once again, with award-winning author J.A. Snow as she takes us on another journey with her ancestors. You will go to war with Private Eddie Snow, visit the Sacrifice Rock with Mercy Snow of the Wampanoag tribe of old Cape Cod, and travel westward with Bertram Snow to the Great Dust Bowl of the Great Plains.

In earlier books in the series, we met the Snow family of Porlock, England, traveled with them through the bloody streets of London during Tudor times, crossed the Atlantic with the original Pilgrims and now stand with them in the American Revolutionary war. Based on over 30 years of genealogical research into the author's own ancestors, this is a story like no other. There is love and hardship; there is treachery and murder. There is honor and courage.