World Family

Summer, 1940. Nineteen-year-old Jakob Novis and his quirky younger sister Lizzie share a love of riddles and puzzles. And now they’re living inside of one. The quarrelsome siblings find themselves amidst one of the greatest secrets of World War II—Britain’s eccentric codebreaking factory at Bletchley Park. As Jakob joins Bletchley’s top minds to crack the Nazi's Enigma cipher, fourteen-year-old Lizzie embarks on a mission to solve the mysterious disappearance of their mother.

King George V predicted that his son, Edward VIII, would destroy himself within a year of succeeding to the throne. In December 1936 he was proved right, and the world’s press revealed the king was abandoning his throne to marry Wallis Simpson. A life spent in the shadow of his charismatic elder brother left the new king, George VI, magnificently unprepared for the demands of ruling the kingdom and empire. Drawing on personal accounts from the royal archives, Deborah Cadbury uncovers the very private conflict.

Alice Comstock has always been a dutiful wife and an attentive mother, a perfectionist presiding over a flawless home. She’s reliably been her family’s center, the caretaker and problem-solver, until an illness requires her children to assume responsibility for their mother. For Adam, Alice’s youngest, a return home to California sparks a memory of his younger self. Alternating between the present and flashbacks to Adam’s college years, "There Are Flowers in Ohio" explores how the paths not taken shape all of our lives.

Ato hasn’t visited his grandmother’s house since he was seven. He’s heard the rumors that she’s a witch, and his mother has told him that he must never sit on the old couch on her porch. Now here he is, on that exact couch, with a strange-looking drink his grandmother has given him, wondering if the rumors are true. What’s more, there’s a freshly dug hole in her yard that Ato suspects may be a grave meant for him.

The four Grace sisters love their quiet life in the country village of Chevis Green. To some, their insular world might seem dull, but the sisters never seem to run out of conversation, jokes, and pleasant ways to pass the time together. They truly are the happiest of families. That is, until Aunt Rona comes to town. Rona intends to stay with the Graces indefinitely, and her meddlesome attitude immediately sets the sisters' teeth on edge. Throw in another unexpected houseguest, some potential suitors and a case of mistaken intentions, and the members of the Grace family suddenly find themselves quite out of their element.

Famed inventor Henry "Hank" Witherspoon has gone missing, and it's up to Jack and his brilliant siblings, Ava and Matt, to find him. At Hank's ransacked lab, the siblings discover clues to the project he's been working on - a new way to generate and store electricity, inspired by the electric eels of the Amazon.

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 . . .

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.

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.

Vietnamese refugees Debbie and Phil Tran have made a good life for themselves in Toronto, but their landlord has just jacked up the rent of their family-run nail salon, Sunshine Nails, and it’s way more than they can afford. When Take Ten, a glamorous chain offering a more luxurious salon experience, moves into the neighborhood, the Tran family is terrified of losing their business—and the community they’ve built around them.

Sara Blum lives an idyllic life with her adoring parents in Vichy France. But her world comes crashing down when the Nazi occupation separates the family and forces the young Jewish girl into hiding. Her classmate Julien and his family will risk everything to ensure her survival, and, together, Sara and Julien manage to find beauty in a secret world of their creation.

Yasmin Ghorami is 26, in training to be a doctor (like her Indian-born father), and engaged to the charismatic, upper-class Joe Sangster, whose formidable mother, Harriet, is a famous feminist. The gulf between families is vast. So, too, is the gulf in sexual experience between Yasmin and Joe. As the wedding day draws near, misunderstandings, infidelities, and long-held secrets upend both Yasmin’s relationship and that of her parents, a “love marriage”, according to the family lore that Yasmin has believed all her life.

Best-selling author Thrity Umrigar won the Nieman Fellowship and earned a finalist spot for the PEN/Beyond Margins award with The Space Between Us. Set in modern-day India, this evocative novel follows upper-middle-class Parsi housewife Sera Dubash and 65-year-old illiterate household worker Bhima as they make their way through life. Though separated by their stations in life, the two women share bonds of womanhood that prove far stronger than the divisions of class or culture.

Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption, their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and to the heart.

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.

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.

Adam and Thomas is the story of two nine-year-old Jewish boys who survive World War II by banding together in the forest. They are alone, visited only furtively every few days by Mina, a mercurial girl who herself has found refuge from the war by living with a peasant family. She makes secret journeys and brings the boys parcels of food at her own risk.

We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests.

An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.

When newlywed Ruby Henderson Benoit arrives in Paris in 1939 with her French husband, Marcel, she imagines strolling arm in arm along the grand boulevards, awash in the golden afternoon light. But war is looming on the horizon, and as France falls to the Nazis, her marriage begins to splinter, too. Charlotte Dacher is 11 when the Germans roll into the French capital, their sinister swastika flags snapping in the breeze. After the Jewish restrictions take effect and Jews are ordered to wear the yellow star, Charlotte can't imagine things getting much worse.