World Family

After the death of her mother, Rebecca is sorting through her empty flat. Starting with the letters piling up on the doormat, she finds an envelope postmarked from Cornwall. In it is a letter that will change her life forever. A desperate plea from her mother’s elderly cousin, Olivia, to help save her beloved home. Rebecca arrives at Chynalls to find the house crumbling into the ground and Olivia stuck in hospital with no hope of being discharged until her home is made habitable.

The historic houses in the seaside town of Beaufort, North Carolina, have held the secrets of their inhabitants for centuries. One of the most enduring refuses to be washed away by the tide: What happened to Rebecca and Townsend Saint James on that fateful night of their disappearance in 1976? Now, the granddaughter they never knew, Keaton Smith, is desperate for a fresh start. So when her mother needs someone to put her childhood home in Beaufort on the market, she jumps at the chance to head south.

The New Year brings challenges and changes to the colorful Irish village of Ballybucklebo. The Christmas holidays have barely passed before a fire engulfs the humble thatched cottage housing of Donal Donnally and his family. Although the family escapes the blaze more or less unsinged, Donal, his wife, their three small children, and their beloved dog find themselves with nothing left but the clothes on their back.

Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong, not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.

Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe.

When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.

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.

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.

At the start of the 20th century, on the edge of the Russian empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste....

Today millions of kids are stuck in a world that doesn't respect, support, or embrace who they really are - these are what Deborah Reber is calling the “differently wired” kids, the one in five children with ADHD, dyslexia, Asperger’s, and other neurodifferences. Their challenges are many. But now there’s hope. Written by Deborah Reber, a best-selling author and mother in the midst of an eye-opening journey with her son who is twice exceptional (he has ADHD, Asperger’s, and is highly gifted), Differently Wired is a how-to, a manifesto, a book of wise advice, and more.

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.

In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.

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.

Gwenda and Douglas Brady were among the millions of British children sent to live with new families for their own safety during the Second World War, leaving behind their parents, their friends and all that felt familiar and safe. Evacuation could be a scary experience, but five-year-old Gwenda and her brother were lucky enough to be housed with a kindly schoolmaster and his wife, and soon the realities of the war felt very far away.

In the 200 years since we discovered that microbes cause infectious diseases, we've battled to keep them at bay. But a recent explosion of scientific knowledge has led to undeniable evidence that early exposure to these organisms is beneficial to our children's well-being. Our current emphasis on hyper-cleanliness is taking a toll on our children's lifelong health. This engaging and important book explains how the millions of microbes that live in our bodies influence childhood development.

This book looks at the rich diversity of family life around the world, introducing children to similarities found in families in different cultures, and honors differences.

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.

Amsterdam 1654: a dangerous secret threatens to destroy a young widow's new life. Following the sudden death of her husband, 25-year-old Catrin leaves her small village and takes a job as housekeeper to the successful Van Nulandt merchant family. Amsterdam is a city at the peak of its powers: science and art are flourishing, and Dutch ships bring back exotic riches from the Far East. When a figure from her past threatens her new life, Catrin flees to Delft. There, her painting talent earns her a chance as a pottery painter.

As Lance and his bedraggled group of survivors trek wearily across a wasted American nation, fighting off bands of criminals that would take everything they own, they discover that the most serious threat is still before them. Their numbers depleted at every stage, they now enter Raton Pass, New Mexico, a place where any semblance of rational thought or empathy for other human beings has long since ceased to exist.

A. J. Jacobs has received some strange emails over the years, but this note was perhaps the strangest: "You don't know me, but I'm your eighth cousin. And we have over 80,000 relatives of yours in our database." That's enough family members to fill Madison Square Garden four times over. Who are these people, A. J. wondered, and how do I find them? So began Jacobs' three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history.