Life Fiction

To the outside world, Electra D’Aplièse seems to be the woman with everything: as one of the world’s top models, she is beautiful, rich and famous. Yet beneath the veneer, Electra’s already tenuous control over her state of mind has been rocked by the death of her father, Pa Salt, the elusive billionaire who adopted his six daughters from across the globe. Struggling to cope, she turns to alcohol and drugs. As those around her fear for her health, Electra receives a letter from a complete stranger who claims to be her grandmother.

Internationally best-selling author Francine Rivers—winner of a Christy Award and the ECPA Gold Medallion—crafts a riveting tale of mother/daughter bonds stretching across decades. Strong-willed Marta leaves Switzerland early in the 20th century and settles in California. Though Marta loves her eldest daughter Hildie, they often clash as they attempt to find their places in the world.

He’s spent months watching my every move. Stalking me from the shadows, waiting for the right moment. When he strikes, I’m not ready. I’m surrounded by strangers, and far from anyone who might have cared, or at the very least, noticed if I suddenly disappeared.

Twelve-year-old Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly 18 months. But there are things Elvis doesn't yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house.

The Whitaker family's Connecticut mansion, Muses by the Sea, has always been a haven for artists, a hotbed of creativity, extravagances, and the occasional scandal. Art patrons for generations, the Whitakers supported strangers but drained the life out of each other. Now, after being estranged for years, four generations of Whitaker women find themselves once again at the Muses. Leo, the Whitaker matriarch, lives in the rambling mansion.

In 1969 Dixie Dupree is 11 years old and already an expert liar. Sometimes the lies are for her mama Evie's sake - to explain away a bruise brought on by her quick-as-lightning temper. And sometimes the lies are to spite Evie, who longs to leave her unhappy marriage in Perry County, Alabama, and return to her beloved New Hampshire. But for Dixie and her brother, Alabama is home, a place of pine-scented breezes and hot, languid afternoons.

Lisa Wingate has been favorably compared to authors Nicholas Sparks and Richard Paul Evans. In A Month of Summer, Hanna Beth has been caring for her aging husband - who suffers from Alzheimer's - and her developmentally challenged adult son for years on her own. But when she suffers a stroke, estranged stepdaughter Rebecca must take the reins. As she cares for her father and the step-brother she's barely met, Rebecca slowly begins to heal both herself and her family.

With Nazis bombing London every night, it's time for 13-year-old Ken to escape. He suspects his stepmother is glad to see him go, but his dad says he's one of the lucky ones - one of 90 boys and girls to ship out aboard the SS City of Benares to safety in Canada. Life aboard the luxury ship is grand-nine-course meals, new friends, and a life far from the bombs, rations, and his stepmum's glare. And after five days at sea, the ship's officers announce that they're out of danger. They're wrong.

Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser's daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she's concerned, moonshine caused her mother's death a dozen years ago. Her father refuses to speak about her mama, or about the day she died. But Jessie has a gnawing hunger for the truth - one that compels her to seek comfort in food.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.

A brilliant rendering of a scandalous historical figure, Kate Manning's My Notorious Life is an ambitious, thrilling novel introducing Axie Muldoon, a fiery heroine for the ages. Axie's story begins on the streets of 1860s New York. The impoverished child of Irish immigrants, she grows up to become one of the wealthiest and most controversial women of her day.

As the war rages on in the summer of 1943, causing massive destruction and widespread fear, the King and Queen choose to quietly send their youngest daughter, Princess Charlotte, to live with a trusted noble family in the country. Despite her fiery, headstrong nature, the princess' fragile health poses far too great a risk for her to remain in war-torn London.

Emma loves her husband Leo and their young daughter Ruby: she’d do anything for them. But almost everything she's told them about herself is a lie. And she might just have got away with it, if it weren’t for her husband’s job. Leo is an obituary writer; Emma a well-known marine biologist. When she suffers a serious illness, Leo copes by doing what he knows best – researching and writing about his wife’s life. But as he starts to unravel the truth, he discovers the woman he loves doesn’t really exist. Even her name isn’t real.

Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to “the other side”, Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next.

The Nasr family is spread across the globe - Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut - a constant touchstone - and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house.

Mae Benson was happy—a beloved wife, beloved mother, beloved neighbor. But even she wasn’t ready for the tragedy looming around the corner. The accident that claims her husband’s life rocks the whole family. And it’s not the only thing stirring up trouble. Mae’s oldest, Eliza, is facing an unexpected pregnancy with a fiancé she no longer wants to be with. Her daughter Holly is caught in a marriage on the rocks. Headstrong daughter Sara is reeling in the throes of a forbidden work-place romance. And her youngest son, Brent, is drowning in sorrow and guilt.

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If you’re a fan of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Edward Scissorhands, or the darkest bits of Roald Dahl, the Weirdie triplets - Barnacle, Garlic, and Melancholy - will feel like old friends. After being left behind when the entire estate of Deadeye Manor is packed up for a doomed vacation cruise, the triplets have to learn how to fend for themselves.

Laurence Sterne's beloved comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is the "biography" of Tristram Shandy - a wonderfully humorous and eccentric narrator who guides the listener from his conception to his birth and on to his life as an adult. The twists and turns of Tristram's life expose him to such memorable characters as Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, Dr. Slop, and the Widow Wadman - whose own stories enrich the central narrative of Tristram's life.

Wanda Petronski is different from all the other girls in Room 13. Every day she wears the same faded blue dress to school, and every day she tells about her hundred dresses at home. Her classmates joke about her imaginary clothes - until they learn the wonderful secret of the dresses.