World Family

Anita Rau Badami's acclaimed novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? chronicles the stories of three women, linked in love and tragedy, over a span of fifty years, sweeping from the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 to the explosion of Air India flight 182 off the coast of Ireland in 1985.

When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng.

After the release of Anita Rau Badami's critically acclaimed first novel, Tamarind Mem, it was evident a promising new talent had joined the Canadian literary community. Her dazzling literary follow-up is The Hero's Walk, a novel teeming with the author's trademark tumble of the haphazard beauty, wreckage and folly of ordinary lives.

Life is quiet and ordinary in Amal's Pakistani village, but she has no complaints, and besides, she's busy pursuing her dream of becoming a teacher one day. Her dreams are temporarily dashed when - as the eldest daughter - she must stay home from school to take care of her siblings. Amal is upset, but she doesn't lose hope and finds ways to continue learning. Then the unimaginable happens - after an accidental run-in with the son of her village's corrupt landlord, Amal must work as his family's servant to pay off her own family's debt.

Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic - each party completely unknown to the others.

Our greatest need is to be recognized—to be seen, loved, and embedded in rich relationships with those around us. But for the last century, we’ve displaced that need with the ease of technology. We’ve dreamed of mastery without relationship (what the premodern world called magic) and abundance without dependence (what Jesus called Mammon). Yet even before a pandemic disrupted that quest, we felt threatened and strangely out of place: lonely, anxious, bored amid endless options, oddly disconnected amid infinite connections.

The Best Year Ever! That's what Ramona thought the fourth grade was going to be, but things aren't turning out as she hoped. Sure, she has a new best friend named Daisy. But how can she improve her spelling as her teacher insists, or be the role model for her baby sister, Roberta, that Mrs. Quimby expects? Fourth-grade life is full of adventure and challenges, and at the end of it all - a "zeroteenth" birthday to celebrate!

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross created her classic seminal work, On Death and Dying, to offer us a new perspective on the terminally ill. It is not a psychoanalytic study, nor is it a "how-to" manual for managing death. Rather, it refocuses on the patient as a human being and a teacher, in the hope that we will learn from him or her about the final stages of life.

Isabelle Shelton has always found comfort in the predictable world of her mother’s dressmaking shop, Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions, while her sister Sylvia turned her back on the family years ago to marry a wealthy doctor whom Izzie detests. When their mother dies unexpectedly, the sisters are stunned to find they’ve jointly inherited the family business. Izzie is determined to buy Sylvia out, but when she’s conscripted into the WAAF, she’s forced to seek Sylvia’s help to keep the shop open.

Sweetbitter meets The Nightingale in this pause-resisting novel about a woman who returns to her family’s ancestral vineyard in Burgundy and unexpectedly uncovers a lost diary, an unknown relative, and a secret her family has been keeping since World War II. To become one of only a few hundred certified wine experts in the world, Kate must pass the notoriously difficult Master of Wine examination. She’s failed twice before; her third attempt will be her last chance.

Gabrielle and Ben Blair have been raising kids for over two decades. Through the years, they’ve charted their own unconventional path: working from home before remote work was a thing; uprooting their kids four, five, six times–including a move to France where they enrolled in local schools without knowing the language. It’s been a unique parenting journey characterized by experimentation, trial and error, decisions prompted by financial or psychological necessity, varying levels of anxiety and tension, despair, and hope.

Twelve-year-old Jude struggles with some things: focusing at school, feeling like everything rests on their shoulders, not being able to come out as nonbinary to their old-fashioned grandparents. But Jude doesn't struggle with Dallas, their best friend in the whole world. Their person. Jude and Dallas's world changes when they learn Stevie, a girl in their class, has been ousted from the popular clique at school. Worried it had something to do with Stevie's rumored crush on another girl, Jude reaches out to see if Stevie is okay.

In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising - an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis. Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria's tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged....

Just weeks before Christmas, severe wintry weather damages the church hall hosting the Christmas Boutique - an annual sale of handcrafted gifts and baked goods that supports the county food pantry. Determined to save the fundraiser, Sylvia Bergstrom Compson offers to hold the event at Elm Creek Manor, her ancestral family estate and summertime home to Elm Creek Quilt Camp.

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.

Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations.

Who are you when the teeth come out? For every true act of leadership, there is an equal and monstrous act of sabotage. Our leaders have been entirely routed by the agitated and the anxious. These emotional tyrannies manifest themselves in local libraries, HR cubicles, elder meetings, and at your Thanksgiving dinners.

From the author of The School for German Brides, this captivating historical novel set in nineteenth-century and post-World War II Paris follows two fierce women of the same family, generations apart, who find that their futures lie in the four walls of a simple bakery in a tiny corner of Montmartre.

Every so often a love story so captures our hearts that it becomes more than a story—it becomes an experience to remember forever. The Notebook is such a book. It is a celebration of how passion can be ageless and timeless, a tale that moves us to laughter and tears and makes us believe in true love all over again . . .

New York City/Paris, 1942: When American model Jessica May arrives in Europe to cover the war as a photojournalist for Vogue, most of the soldiers are determined to make her life as difficult as possible. But three friendships change that. Journalist Martha Gellhorn encourages Jess to bend the rules. Captain Dan Hallworth keeps her safe in dangerous places so she can capture the stories that truly matter. And most important of all, the love of a little orphan named Victorine gives Jess strength to do the impossible. But her success will come at a price....