Family Life Fiction

Born on the Norwegian island that bears her name, Ingrid Barrøy’s world is circumscribed by storm-scoured rocks and the moods of the sea by which her family lives and dies. But her father dreams of building a quay that will end their isolation, and her mother longs for the island of her youth, and the country faces its own sea change: the advent of a modern world, and all its unpredictability and violence.

Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: He will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.

Highliners are the elite of the fishing world, the skippers and crews who make the biggest catches—salmon, king crab, halibut, shrimp—and deliver them first to the bustling canneries of Kodiak and Dutch Harbor. For these men—and for their women—the safe eight-hour day does not exist. It never will. Some fishermen get rich, many die broke. But they find a special joy in their work that can never be matched by the easier world of the landsman.

Donald J. Sobol’s pint-sized amateur detective has been a hit with young readers for over three decades. For 25 cents a day—plus expenses—Encyclopedia Brown will solve any case, big or small for the kids in his neighborhood. He also secretly works with his police chief father to crack the toughest investigations and keep the streets of Idaville safe. Here are 10 more beguiling mysteries that will have listeners scratching their heads.

In 1961 Charlotte, North Carolina, the predominantly black neighborhood of Brooklyn is a bustling city within a city. Self-contained and vibrant, it has its own restaurants, schools, theaters, churches, and night clubs. There are shotgun shacks and poverty, along with well-maintained houses like the one Loraylee Hawkins shares with her young son, Hawk, her Uncle Ray, and her grandmother, Bibi. Loraylee's love for Archibald Griffin, Hawk's white father and manager of the cafeteria where she works, must be kept secret in the segregated South.

When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later. From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep.

If anyone understands the phrase "tough luck", it's Harrison. As a foster kid in a cruel home, he knows his dream of one day playing for the NFL is a long shot. Then Harrison's luck seems to change. He is brought into a new home with kind, loving parents - his new dad is even a football coach. Harrison's big build and his incredible determination quickly make him a star running back on the junior high school team. In no time, he's practically unstoppable. But Harrison's good luck can't last forever.

When Meghan DeFord is forced to take a six-week leave-of-absence after a traffic accident, she chooses to spend the time with her grandmother. Meghan has wonderful memories of childhood summers with her Grandma Hazel and anticipates a time of relaxation and filling a scrapbook with pictures of their time together. Meghan's mother arrives unexpectedly and brings her long resentment towards Hazel for her overprotectiveness and near paranoia. During their time together, Hazel confesses her long-held secret....

Este es el primero de dos libros en una saga que explora las complicadas relaciones entre madres e hijas a través de cuatro generaciones. A finales del siglo XIX, la impetuosa Marta deja Suiza decidida a encontrar la vida bajo sus propios términos. Su educador viaje la lleva a través de Europa y Canadá, y finalmente la carga con la compañía de hijos y un esposo en el valle central de California.

Actress Willow Carruthers is living the dream in London, with an Oscar on her shelf, a rock-star husband and two gorgeous children. But Willow isn't coping with her seemingly perfect life. Country girl Kitty Middlemist arrives in London desperate for a job. She has a perfect pedigree on paper but no particular skills in real life. Work is hard to find until Kitty, quite by chance, takes on a job with Willow. As their lives and secrets become intertwined, Willow and Kitty discover there is no such thing as chance - only destiny.

Before Josh and Jordan Bell were streaking up and down the court, their father was learning his own moves. In this prequel to Newbery Medal winner The Crossover, Chuck Bell takes center stage, as listeners get a glimpse of his childhood and how he became the jazz music worshiping basketball star his sons look up to. A novel in verse with all the impact and rhythm listeners have come to expect from Kwame Alexander, Rebound will go back in time to visit the childhood of Chuck "Da Man" Bell during one pivotal summer when young Charlie is sent to stay with his grandparents, where he discovers basketball and learns more about his family's past.

In this final book, Clementine is having a feud with her father - she's so mad she can't even speak to him. Besides that, she has to deal with the end of the school year and all the good-byes she must say - Clementine does N-O-T, not like saying good-bye. (Neither do I! I had a lump in my throat all the time I was writing the book - I am going to miss this girl and her family so much!)

Carol Cassella, a freelance medical writer and a practicing anesthesiologist, grounds her haunting debut novel Oxygen in the life-or-death scenarios of the modern medical field. Marie Heaton's successful anesthesiology practice is derailed when a child dies under the mask. Faced with a major lawsuit, she must turn to a former lover for moral support.

To 12-year-old Molly Nathans, perfect is: the number four; the tip of a newly sharpened No. 2 pencil; a crisp white pad of paper; her neatly aligned glass animal figurines. What's not perfect is Molly's mother leaving the family to take a faraway job with the promise to return in one year. Molly knows that promises are sometimes broken, so she hatches a plan to bring her mother home: Win the Lakeville Middle School Poetry Slam Contest. The winner is honored at a fancy banquet with white tablecloths. Molly is sure her mother would never miss that. Right?

From the opening story, "Willing" - about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being - Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

Hallie faces the greatest challenge of her life... Hallie, Ava's best friend, has gone through drastic changes and has come to a happy point in her life. Now, she wants to branch out into being a life coach. However, a routine checkup brings dark news. Suddenly, she's in the fight of her life, but she has her best friends by her side the entire time. Charlotte, Ava's daughter, is facing a crisis of her own. She has a newborn, and her husband wants a divorce. She needs to learn to stand on her own two feet, and she does. However, a medical emergency regarding Siobhan brings everything into ...

Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is - after all - only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There's only one problem: Their country is a war zone.

A tragic accident: One woman is left dead after she and another woman, both running away from their marriages, collide in the fog on a highway. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind. Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why.

Joan Mitchell has two suitors, and can’t decide whom to marry. With her mother Aurelie’s example in mind, she’d like to skip marriage altogether. Joan and Aurelie live together in a beautiful French Quarter home on Coliseum Street in New Orleans, along with Joan’s many half-sisters born of Aurelie’s five disastrous marriages. Joan lives a mostly carefree life, but when she becomes pregnant, she chooses to end her pregnancy rather than marry a man she doesn’t love - a decision with grave consequences in conservative 1950s New Orleans.

Meet Zezé—Brazil’s naughtiest and most loveable boy, his talent for mischief matched only by his great kindness. When he grows up he wants to be a ‘poet with a bow-tie’, but for now he entertains himself playing pranks on the residents of his family’s poor Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood and inventing friends to play with. That is, until he meets a real friend, and his life begins to change.