A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.
Domestic fiction
- Author:Wroblewski, DavidSummary:
- Author:Berg, ElizabethSummary:
A life-affirming novel about an unforgettable character, a wise and loving man whose humor and unconditional love create for himself and others second chances at happiness. Three people find their way back from loss and loneliness to a different kind of belonging, in this deeply moving novel. Arthur, an old widower struggling to overcome his grief, meets Maddy, a troubled teenage girl who avoids school by hiding out where Arthur goes every day for lunch. The two strike up a friendship that draws them out of isolation. Maddy gives Arthur the name Truluv for his positive responses to every outrageous thing she says or does. When Arthur's nosy neighbor Lucille horns in on their friendship, they create an unconventional family, sometimes bickering, but most often believing that life's most precious moments are sweeter when shared.
- Author:Laurence, MargaretSummary:
In The Stone Angel, Hagar Shipley, age ninety, tells the story of her life, and in doing so tries to come to terms with how the very qualities which sustained her have deprived her of joy. Mingling past and present, she maintains pride in the face of senility, while recalling the life she led as a rebellious young bride, and later as a grieving mother. Laurence gives us in Hagar a woman who is funny, infuriating, and heartbreakingly poignant.
- Author:Mallery, SusanSummary:
Rival stepsisters put aside their differences for their common younger sister. But when their fragile truce is threatened, will they turn their backs on each other, or could they learn to forgive?
- Author:Weldon, Fay.Summary:
Sappho was so happy when she married Gavin. She was in love and it seemed that at last everything was falling into place. But she hadn't considered his daughter, Isobel. Now cast in the role of Wicked Stepmother, Sappho tries all she can to befriend Isobel and find her place in the new family. It's not easy, but no one had promised it would be.
- Author:Jackson, NaomiSummary:
Two sisters are suddenly sent from their home in Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, in this stunning debut novel This lyrical novel of community, betrayal, and love centers on an unforgettable matriarchal family in Barbados. Two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother's mysterious life. This tautly paced coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family. Jackson's Barbados and her characters are singular, especially the wise Hyacinth and the heartbreaking young Phaedra, who is coming into her own as a young woman amid the tumult of her family.
- Author:Crewe, LesleySummary:
Born into a basket of clean sheets - ruining a perfectly good load of laundry - Emmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don't know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of spoons over her lifetime - from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer. When Emmeline unexpectedly inherits the farm she grew up on, she knows she needs to leave her new friends and go see the farm and what remains of her family one last time. She arrives like a tornado in their lives, an off-kilter Mary Poppins bossing everyone around and getting quite a lot wrong. But with her generosity and hard-earned wisdom, she gets an awful lot right too. A pinball ricocheting between people, offending and inspiring in equal measure, Emmeline, in her final years, believes that a spoonful - perhaps several spoonfuls - of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy.
- Author:Babiak, ToddSummary:
Warm, witty, and unsettling all at once, here is an unforgettable story of a family desperate for something to believe in. Benedict is an inventor whose life’s work is a clean energy machine. It has just made him an overnight sensation and his family is suddenly wealthy. Benedict’s wife, Karen, and his teenage daughters, Charlotte and Poppy, are proud of him. But there are problems Benedict is too busy to see: Karen is deeply unhappy in the marriage and contemplating an affair, Charlotte, who is dealing with a chronic illness, is growing more and more distant, and Poppy is cracking under the pressures of her social circle. And there’s another problem. Benedict holds a rather terrible secret about his clean energy machine. Then, on Halloween night, an accident threatens to make everything far worse for the family. The accident kicks off a series of hauntings in their beautiful, historic home in affluent Belgravia, and the ghosts make it clear that they want something from them. Karen has to save her daughters — and herself. Meanwhile, Benedict is consumed by the knowledge that he has to achieve the impossible by Christmas. As time ticks ever closer to the revelation of his secret, he spirals further into despair . . . The Spirits Up is the story of a family haunted by the charmlessness of middle age and the cruelties of modern teenage life. Part social satire and part contemporary ghost story (with a hint of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol ), it is an exploration of a timeless question: what happens when there’s nothing to believe?
- Author:Whittall, Zoe.Summary:
It's taboo to regret motherhood. But what would happen if you did? Shifting perspectives and time periods, The Spectacular is a multi-generational story exploring sexuality, gender and the weight of reproductive freedoms, from the author of The Best Kind of People. It's 1997 and Missy's band has finally hit the big time as they tour across America. At twenty-two years old, Missy gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. Missy is the only girl in the band and she's determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving someone in every town. But then a forgotten party favour strands her at the border. Forty-something Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga centre where she has been living, when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years-on the cover of a music magazine. Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter Missy winds up crashing at her house, she decides it's time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand each other again. In her new book, by turns sharp and provocative, Zoe Whittall captures three generations of very different women who struggle to build an authentic life in the absence of traditional familial and marital structures. Definitions of family, romance, gender and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.
- Author:White, KarenSummary:
The New York Times bestselling author of A Long Time Gone now explores a Southern family's buried history, which will change the life of the woman who unearths it, secret by shattering secret. It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward's husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news: Cal's family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal's reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt. Charting the course of an uncertain life'and feeling guilt from her husband's tragic death'Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal's unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritt's, will change and define her as she navigates her new life'a new life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old half-brother. Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Low Country.
- Author:Solomons, NatashaSummary:
Harry Fox-Talbot and his brothers are determined to save their once grand home from ruin. Fifty years later, now a celebrated composer, Fox reels from the death of his adored wife, Edie. But his connection with his four-year-old grandson--a piano prodigy--propels him back into life.
- Author:Foster, LoriSummary:
This summer, as sisters "reliable" Autumn and "free spirit" Ember work hand in hand to run the animal rescue property their grandparents created, they'll see that family can be a blessing and a curse, and sometimes both at the same time. But there's nothing quite like the ties of sisterhood and the promise of new love just around the corner.
- Author:Mcwatt, TessaSummary:
Tessa McWatt's breathtaking new novel explores love and endurance in the face of change and violence, and how people find wholeness and belonging when their own identities feel shattered. Northern India, 2009. Four travellers disembark from the Dhauladhar Express at the Pathankot train station, having arrived in Punjab to attend a wedding. Yosh, 30, a yoga teacher from Vancouver; Monica, 30, the bride's cousin from Toronto; Reema, 26, the bride's childhood friend, a mixed-heritage Londoner in search of her Indianness; and Jackson, 86, who is returning to India after a long hiatus in Boston, and who carries with him a small tea canister in which he has placed his wife Amelia's ashes. As they gather with other guests at the traditional Indian wedding, Jackson and Reema develop a reluctant, unlikely friendship that grows through mutual need and a slowly developing trust, and together with Yosh and Monica, they embark on a post-wedding journey to the Himalayas, seeking the perfect place to scatter Amelia's ashes. As they travel together, secrets are revealed, and each of them is opened up to more questions than answers. These intergenerational and intercultural relationships are a meeting of the past and the future, a reconciliation of past wrongs and a possibility that the future might be less violent, less selfish, less segregated. But can it be?
- Author:Noblin, Annie EnglandSummary:
From the author of Sit! Stay! Speak! comes the heartwarming story of three sisters who reunite after their beloved aunt's death to repair their fractured relationships. The Sisters Hemingway: they couldn't be more different ... or more alike. The Sisters Hemingway were coming back to Cold River ... Hadley, the poised, polished wife of a SenatorPfeiffer, the successful New York book editorMartha, who skyrocketed to Nashville stardom. They each have a secret ... a marriage on the rocks, a job lost, a stint in rehab ... and they haven't been together in years. Returning for the funeral of the aunt who raised them, the sisters must stay together in their childhood home, faced with a puzzle that may affect all their futures. As they learn the truth of what happened to their mother and youngest sister, and rekindle the bonds they had as children, bonds that had once seemed broken. With the help of neighbors, friends, love interests old and new--and one endearing and determined basset hound, the Sisters Hemingway learn that the happiness that has appeared so elusive may be right here at home, just waiting to be claimed.
- Author:Smith, AndreaSummary:
In a small town in 1950s South Carolina, Bonnie Wilder's husband finds an abandoned baby by the river. After voicing her concern for local mothers who are unable to raise their children, Bonnie finds more abandoned newborns on her doorstep. Soon she forms a secret network to match the babies with childless families. Thirty years later, one of those babies wants to know about her past.
- Author:Walls, JeannetteSummary:
Abandoned by their artist mother at the age of twelve, Bean and her older sister, Liz, are sent to live in the decaying antebellum mansion of their widowed uncle, where they learn the truth about their parents and take odd jobs to earn extra money before an increasingly withdrawn Liz has a life-shattering experience.
- Author:Harrison, A. S. A.Summary:
Jodi and Todd are at a bad place in their marriage. Much is at stake, including the affluent life they lead in their beautiful waterfront condo in Chicago, as she, the killer, and he, the victim, rush haplessly toward the main event.
- Author:Rowe, PaulSummary:
In the early 1900s a young and newly wed Leona Merrigan sets out from the Newfoundland community of Three Brooks to find a better life in Knock Harbour on the island's Cape Shore. After some happy years, tragedy strikes when she unwittingly brings disaster upon her home. Years later, William Cantwell, a politician tormented by regret, finds Leona in Knock Harbour, virtually alone but for her only child, a deaf girl named Dulcie. Both William and Leona come to focus on Dulcie's education as a way to mend their shattered lives. Meanwhile, a vindictive civil servant, Arthur Duke, lurks in the background. Soon, political events unfold which threaten the promising new future that Dulcie, William and Leona are shaping for themselves. In the end, Leona must face her troubled past and unearth the long-held secret which might keep her own and Dulcie's dreams alive. A redemptive tale of ruined lives righted again through love, grace, and good fortune, The Silent Time contains memorable characters, compelling narrative and passages of lyrical beauty.
- Author:Coel, MargaretSummary:
Father John O'Malley and Vicky Holden investigate the murder of an Arapaho Indian from the Wind River Reservation, who was in Hollywood trying to uncover the mystery of his great-grandfather's disappearance while filming a 1923 Western.
- Author:Trigiani, AdrianaSummary:
The fateful first meeting of Enza and Ciro takes place amid the haunting majesty of the Italian Alps at the turn of the last century. Still teenagers, they are separated when Ciro is banished from his village and sent to hide in New York's Little Italy, apprenticed to a shoemaker, leaving a bereft Enza behind. But when her own family faces disaster, she, too, is forced to emigrate to America. Though destiny will reunite the star-crossed lovers, it will, just as abruptly, separate them once again'sending Ciro off to serve in World War I, while Enza is drawn into the glamorous world of the opera ... and into the life of the international singing sensation Enrico Caruso. Still, Enza and Ciro have been touched by fate'and, ultimately, the power of their love will change their lives forever. A riveting historical epic of love and family, war and loss, risk and destiny, inspired by the author's own family history, The Shoemaker's Wife is the novel Adriana Trigiani was born to write.
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