World Family

The golden traditions of Christmas—gifts, wreaths, stockings, carols, mistletoe, and more—infuse your celebration of the season with meaning and glowing memories. And, in ways you may not realize, they also point you to the birth of Christ. Stories Behind the Great Traditions of Christmas reveals the people, places, and events that shaped the best-loved customs of this merriest of holidays.

When Morgan and Benji surprise their families with a wedding invitation to Maine, they’re aware the news of their clandestine relationship will come as a shock. Twelve years have passed since the stunning loss of sixteen-year-old Alice, Benji’s sister and Morgan’s best friend, and no one is quite the same. But the young couple decide to plunge headlong into matrimony, marking the first time their fractured families will reunite since Alice’s funeral.

It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and 33-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his 15-year-old daughter, Angel, shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother's house, setting her life on a startling new path.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, here is the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a novel where past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan's devastation in the wake of World War II.

Frances and Ginger Park, authors of both children's books and young adult novels, based this inspiring and deeply affecting tale on their own mother's childhood. Winner of the International Reading Association Award, My Freedom Trip features a courageous girl named Soo who makes a desperate bid for freedom by journeying from North Korea to South Korea. Her father awaits across the border, but to achieve her new life, Soo must leave her mother behind.

Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, this is the story of one family's struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence in the face of racism and social injustice. And it is also Cassie's story - Cassie Logan, an independent girl who discovers over the course of an important year why having land of their own is so crucial to the Logan family, even as she learns to draw strength from her own sense of dignity and self-respect.

Eager to cheer up her recently widowed gran, Cassie Fitzgerald, visiting from Canada, persuades Lissbeg Library to set up a Skype book club, linking readers on Ireland's Finfarran Peninsula with the US town of Resolve, home to generations of Finfarran emigrants. But when the club decides to read a detective novel, old conflicts on both sides of the ocean are exposed and hidden love affairs come to light. As secrets emerge, Cassie fears she may have done more harm than good. Will the truths she uncovers about her granny Pat's marriage affect her own hopes of finding love?

As a global pandemic shuttered schools across the country in 2020, parents found themselves thrust into the role of teacher — in more ways than one. Not only did they take on remote school supervision, but after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, many also grappled with the responsibility to teach their kids about social justice — with few resources to guide them.

Lily is the ultimate poor little rich girl, abandoned by her parents and sent to the best Swiss boarding school money could buy. Her parents have a society wedding in mind for her but then Lily meets Harry Kohle, an ambitious young writer.

Rilla, almost 15, can't think any further ahead than going to her very first dance at the Four Winds lighthouse and getting her first kiss from handsome Kenneth Ford. But undreamed-of challenges await the irrepressible Rilla when the world of Ingleside becomes endangered by a far-off war. Her brothers go off to fight, and Rilla brings home an orphaned newborn in a soup tureen. She is swept into a drama that tests her courage and leaves her changed forever.

Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has the perfect life - married to a beautiful police officer, and father of two young boys. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene. When the victim's widow knocks at Eitan's door the next day, holding his wallet and divulging that she knows what happened, Eitan discovers that her price for silence is not money.

How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings? This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings.

After their adventures in China and Germany, the Kidd family is ready for some rest and relaxation. But when you're an ace treasure hunting team, there's always another adventure waiting around the corner! This time the Kidds head to Russia, where a set of priceless paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt has gone missing. Hot on the trail of the daring thieves, the Kidds race through the sinister streets of St. Petersburg and the wild Arctic tundra to track down the stolen treasure.

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.

This is the story of Bull Meecham, the epitome of the Marine officer. Demanding, authoritarian, as tough a disciplinarian at home as at the base, Bull is a difficult man to please, and even harder to love. This is also the story of Ben Meecham, Bull’s oldest son. A gifted athlete whose best never satisfies his father, Ben must balance his own ambition with his father’s expectations – and decide what course he will chart for himself and what kind of man he will become.

When Bick and Beck Kidd find a hidden trove of pirate treasure, it includes a map with clues to an even bigger score: the lost Incan city of Paititi. But treasure hunting is never easy - and when the map is stolen, the Kidds must rely on Storm's picture-perfect memory to navigate the dangerous Amazon jungle. Watch out for that nest of poisonous snakes!

Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Procházka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown.

On Instagram, the private work of mothering has been turned into a public performance that’s generating billions of dollars, and the message is simple: that we’re all just a couple of clicks away from a better, more beautiful experience of motherhood. Momfluenced examines the performance of motherhood—producers of it and consumers of it—through the multilayered phenomenon of the mommy influencer.

The story girl of the title is the 14-year-old Sara Stanley who weaves spellbinding tales that enchant her audience that comes from near and far. These 32 stories range from the humorous and satirical to exotic romances, Scottish folk tales, retellings of Greek myths and poems by Tennyson, to ghost stories. They include the scary "Tale of the Family Ghost", and the bittersweet "The Blue Chest of Rachel Ward".

Germany, 1937. Fear and betrayal stalk the streets. People disappear. Persecution of the Jews has become a national pastime. When Ruth Friedman's husband is arrested by the SS, she is left to fend for herself and her four children. She alone stands as their shield against the Nazis. But where can she go? Where will her family be safe? Ruth must overcome the indifference, hatred and cruelty that surrounds her as she and her family race to escape the advancing Nazi army's final solution.