Literary Fiction Family

The human “oddities” in the Museum of the Strange are less wondrous than the gawking rubes had been promised. But Alida is something else. The real thing. Traveling Depression-era America from carnival midways to speakeasies, Alida is resigned to an exploited and lonely life on the road as the museum’s golden ticket. Until she’s rescued by two compassionate strangers. Franklin and Loretta Fairchild see in Alida a gifted and uncannily well-read girl in need of a loving touch and a family. With the openhearted couple and their three precociously imaginative children, Alida finds it.

Behind every perfect life lies a storm waiting to break. Mark, Austin, and Quincey look like they have it all—successful careers, loving wives, and friendships that have stood the test of time. But beneath the surface, infidelity, unemployment, and buried traumas are tearing them apart. Mark is a once-proud provider now out of work, desperate to prove his worth. His wife, Terri is exhausted from the struggle of life and starved for affection. Until she's drawn back to her former college professor, a man who offers the attention she craves—but at a cost that could shatter her family ...

Leda, a middle-aged divorcee, is alone for the first time in years when her daughters leave home to live with their father. Her initial, unexpected sense of liberty turns to ferocious introspection following a seemingly trivial occurrence. Throughout the novel, Ferrante's language is as finely tuned and intense as ever, and she treats her theme with a fierce, candid tenacity.

The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force more than a father and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at 14 by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way.

Sherry has struggled all her life to understand who she is, where she comes from, and, most importantly, why her mother slapped her cheek one summer afternoon. The incident has haunted Sherry, and it causes her to dig into her family's past. Like many family histories, it is fractured and reluctant to reveal its secrets; but Sherry remains determined. In just a few days' time, her extended family will gather for a reunion, and Sherry sets off across the country with her mother, Dumpling, to join them.

Inspired by a near-mythic event on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the 20th century, Shadow Country re-imagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.

Los Angeles, California: Clem Jasper is a trust fund kid with a world famous rock musician for a father. When he dies suddenly (playing ping pong) she discovers he's left her a strange legacy: a series of letters that take her on a mysterious road trip around California. Ignoring her aunt's suggestion that she pitch the trip as a reality show, she embarks on her own to discover just what it was that her father meant her to find. What secret could be so powerful that he had to die before telling her?

Matthew King was once considered one of the most fortunate men in Hawaii. His missionary ancestors who came to the islands were financially and culturally progressive - one even married a Hawaiian princess, making Matt a royal descendant and one of the state’s largest landowners. But now his luck has changed. His two daughters are out of control - 10-year-old Scottie has a smart-ass attitude and a desperate need for attention and 17-year-old Alex is a recovering drug addict.

This searing novel from the bestselling author of Such a Bad Influence, follows a young woman whose life is upended when a journalist uncovers her hidden past as the daughter of an insidious cult leader. From the outside, Catharine West’s childhood sounds idyllic—balmy days spent running...

Sal seems to appear out of nowhere - a bruised and tattered 13-year-old boy claiming to be the devil himself answering an invitation. Fielding Bliss, the son of a local prosecutor, brings him home, where he's welcomed into the Bliss family, who assume he's a runaway from a nearby farm town. When word spreads that the devil has come to Breathed, not everyone is happy to welcome this self-proclaimed fallen angel. Murmurs follow him, and tensions rise along with the temperatures as an unbearable heat wave rolls into town right along with him.

Years of long workdays and little sleep as a political campaigner are about to pay off now that Lucy Toomey's boss is entering the White House. But when her estranged older sister, Alice, unexpectedly dies, Lucy is drawn back to Nilson's Bay, her small, close-knit Wisconsin hometown.

Vermont, 1972. Carole LaPorte has a satisfying, ordinary life. She cares for her children, balances the books for the family's auto shop, and laughs when her husband slow dances her across the kitchen floor. Her tragic childhood might have happened to someone else. But now her mind is playing tricks on her. The accounts won't reconcile and the murmuring she hears isn't the television.

A Signature Performance: Leelee Sobieski’s Emma is sultry but vulnerable, offering a sympathetic rendering of the heroine and her plight, allowing the listener to draw his own conclusions about Madame Bovary in this cautionary tale of love, passion, and desperation.

It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse - the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a 15-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families.

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss “A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack...

Like many well-to-do Upper East Siders over the age of 65, esteemed art appraiser Percival Skinner had planned to spend his retirement living off his savings. But a market correction has left him living below his prior means. One day he’s visited by a dapper fixer in search of a famous work by a Renaissance master. Skinner knows the work well: The original was owned by his ancestor, and was passed down through his family over the generations. If, as an intermediary, he can coordinate a sale, a small fortune awaits. Problem is, he might not be the only one on the make.

Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice’s family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended.

The Road Home lies in the shadows of Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee; it is etched into the landscape of an old man’s memory and into the stubborn dreams of a young man’s heart. In one of Jim Harrison’s greatest works, five members of the Northridge family narrate the tangled epic of their history on the expanses of the Nebraska plains. They strive to understand their fates, to reconcile with demons of the past, to live in accordance with the land, and to die with grace.

The Last Good Seat at the Bar is a lyrical Southern story about coming home, facing ghosts, and rediscovering love. Burned-out journalist Morgan Langford retreats to her late grandfather’s coastal cabin in South Carolina, expecting only quiet and solitude. Instead, she finds the Low Country alive with memory: music drifting from an old record player, whispers of a presence she can’t explain, and a reunion with Ashley, the first love she thought she’d lost forever. As Morgan repairs the cabin and unravels family secrets, she confronts the truth about her grandfather’s death, her ...

William McCloskey’s best-selling novel Highliners established him as an authority on the dangers and hardships of the Alaskan fishing industry. Now in an epic sequel, Breakers returns to Kodiak to chart the fortunes of McCloskey’s beloved characters as they make their living from the sea.