Showing titles in Genre Fiction

Nora and Fern's relationship as mother and daughter is a tumble of love and distrust. To Nora, her daughter is an enigma - at the same time wonderful and unfindable. Fern sees her mother as treacherous - for busting up their family to move in with her lover, Jeanne. As their lives become complicated by the arrivals of a skateboarding boyfriend for Fern, a shadowy affair for Nora, a baby in need of a family, and by the failing health of Lucky, their beloved dog, this mother and daughter find their way onto a fresh footing with each other.

By Cecile depicts post-World War II France as it reels from war and recovery. In Paris, an orphan girl, Cecile, finds refuge with an older man. He introduces her to nightclubs, intellectuals, artists (Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eartha Kitt!), and non-monogamy. When she falls for his mistress, she begins to live a life she deems worthy of writing about...but only under the pseudonym of her husband.

The story is set in the aftermath of World War One. Paul Harris, still frail after shellshock, returns to his father’s home and to the arms of his secret lover, Adam. He discovers that Margot, the fiancée of his dead brother, is pregnant and marries her through a sense of loyalty. Through Adam he finds work as a schoolteacher; while setting up a home with Margot he continues to see Adam.

In this suspenseful and deeply moving novel, Michael Thomas Ford propels us beyond smiling holiday photographs and beloved anecdotes to explore the complex ties within one family - and between two very different brothers whom catastrophe will either unite or divide forever....

Max Arrington, the Duke of Pelham, vows to never again let a handsome face blind him to a man's true intentions. But ten months of celibacy and lonely nights drive him to a decadent brothel, where a beautiful young man arouses his illicit passions as never before. Tristan Walsh has grown tired of being used for men's pleasure. But his latest client is different: Commanding yet generous, Max makes him feel cared for as well as wanted.

In The Boomerang Kid, Maura Ostryder is coming into her own, professionally and privately, as she begins her 51st year. Maura has always been the master of her own life and has reared her son, Kai (named for the Hawaiian word for sea) to be the same way. But now a grown Kai has come home, having fled emotional attachments to both a young man and a young woman, bringing with him his addiction to painkillers.

In 1933 in the Shenandoah Valley, there isn't a place for Lum (short for Columbia), a 33-year-old intersex woman. She travels by schedule from one branch of the family to another, assisting with cooking, childcare, and housework. Always an outsider, even in her own family, Lum secretly collects postcards of people like the Dog-faced Girl, imagining their stories, and nurtures her lifelong friendship with Smiley, an African-American man who sells furniture, odds and ends, and a little moonshine.

Set in a declining textile town in North Carolina, Hide is the love story of Wendell Wilson, a taxidermist, and Frank Clifton, a veteran of World War II. They meet after the war, in a time when such love holds real danger. But, severing nearly all ties with the rest of the world, they carve out a home for themselves on the outskirts of town and for decades the routine of self-reliant domesticity - Wendell's cooking, Frank's care for a yard no one sees, and the vicarious drama of courtroom TV - seems to protect them.

This is not a hair book. It's a dark comedy of a spiritual misfit, a child with a dream born into the wrong town. Religious cults, corporate cults, and insane clients - Francis can't catch a break. Francis has observed his own inability to fit in since birth, and his decision to be a professional cosmetologist only exacerbates his innate oddness.

Soho 1925. Two young men meet - for one of them this is love at first sight, for the other only lust and guilt.... Paul Harris returns to England from self-imposed exile in Tangiers for an exhibition of his paintings. He leaves behind Patrick, the man he has loved since they met in the trenches in 1918, needing to discover if he has the strength to live without him and wanting to explore the kind of life he might have lived had it not been for the war. In Bohemian Soho, Paul meets Edmund....

Le Paradise est ce club du Red Light de Montréal qui, en 1930, accueille les vieux garçons dans un espace nommé le ringside. C'est là qu'Édouard Tremblay aimerait bien faire son entrée dans le "grand monde", peu après son embauche comme vendeur de chaussures sur l'avenue du Mont-Royal. Car à presque dix-huit ans il est déjà emporté par le double qui l'habite, cette duchesse de Langeais qui deviendra son personnage de folle des nuits de la métropole.

Miriam hasn't left her house in three years and cannot raise her voice above a whisper. But today she has had enough and is finally ready to rejoin the outside world. Meanwhile Ralph has made the mistake of opening a closet door only to discover with a shock that his wife, Sadie, doesn't love him and never has. And so he decides to run away.

After four years of living with relatives in Switzerland, 17-year-old Joel Scherzenlieb finds himself in the United States for the summer, working at a Boy Scout camp. There, he meets 19-year-old Corey Cobbett, a fellow counselor and the only person Joel wants to be friends with. Soon, Joel's sarcastic, distant CIA father shows up and whisks him away to live with his mother, grandmother, and older sister on a farm in Virginia - he's not going back to Switzerland after all.

"En route to polite exile in the Galapagos Islands (field work, to quote the dean of my university), I have found myself marooned on a deserted tropical paradise. Deserted, that is, except for my savior, a mysterious American called Marcus. He is an inventor and the proof of his greatness is the marvelous new clockwork arm he has created to replace the unsightly one that was ruined in my shipboard mishap."

All it took to destroy Andy Nocera's seemingly perfect life was an anonymous tryst at an Interstate rest area. Sentenced to probation and thrown out by his wife, he spends his week as a traveling salesman, and his weekends at his mother's house where no questions are asked - and no explanations are offered. To clear his record, the State of North Carolina requires Andy to complete one year of therapy without another arrest. He attends his sessions reluctantly at first, struggling to comprehend why he would risk everything.

In 1938, while tensions in Europe are reaching a boiling point, four young women with big ambitions enter secretarial school in San Francisco. Motivated to attain the financial stability that eluded their parents, they go to battle for their futures. Moira, of Scottish descent, dreams of being an actress. Ann yearns for the education her Jewish immigrant parents provided for her brother, but not for her. Japanese American Wanda experiences firsthand the racial injustices running rampant in the United States.

1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend - who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at Sugar Land Prison for men, hoping to keep her secret attractions under lock and key. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Leadbelly, who sings his way out (true story) - but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful debut novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.

It’s 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the city’s glamour and energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ballroom scene, where 17-year-old Angel first comes into her own. Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world and has a yearning to help create a family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the ballroom circuit.

Told from three different perspectives, this sweeping saga begins in 1935 Portugal, in the grip of Salazar’s authoritarian regime, where upper-class Jenny enters into an uncommon marriage with the beguiling António. Keeping up appearances, they host salons for the political and cultural elite. In private, Jenny, António, and his lover, Pedro, share a guarded triangle, build a profound relationship, and together raise a daughter born under the auspices of rebellion.

Beyond the Pale - winner of the Lambda Literary Award - tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York.