Showing titles in Family Life

At age 33, Penelope “Pepper” Bradford has no career, no passion, and no children. Her intrusive parents still treat her like a child. Moving into the Chelmsford Arms with her fiancé Rick, an up-and-coming financier, and joining the co-op board give her some control over her life - until her parents take a gut dislike to Rick and urge Pepper to call off the wedding. When, the week before the wedding, she glimpses a trail of desperate text messages from Rick’s obsessed female client, Pepper realizes that her parents might be right. 

Beatrice and Henry - the parents of the protagonist of Dale Peck’s debut novel, Martin and John—are first drawn together when the teenage Henry is battling a brain tumor he believes will soon claim his life. But forty years later they’re still a couple, in a story that moves from Long Island to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and from love to hate and back again.

James Ramsay is twenty-one years old and he has just inherited a building in New York City. After the death of his estranged mother, he finds that he is now the owner of No. 1 Dutch Street - a five-story brownstone near the World Trade Center. As James takes up residence there, trying to figure out his next move, he gets to know the only other tenant: an elderly black woman named Nellydean. Under a mounting tide of taxes, James finds himself faced with a stark choice.

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions quickly escalate between them and their religious neighbors. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope.

Satellite Street is woven through with the theme of transitions. Paul Marden is grappling with the way that a sudden, devastating illness and his slow recovery have made him reevaluate what "normal" is for a man in his 60s who grew up in a time of change that promised better days than the ones he is now living through. Another character's transition involves both gender and spirit; Lelee was born male and wanted to transition to female, but the process has been hindered by heart issues. Lelee also believes that she can speak to the dead, although she is skeptical.

On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing. Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

After 23 years of marriage to Zack Ronan--and after raising the widower's three kids--Chris finds himself facing an uncertain second act. Seeking refuge in North Carolina's Outer Banks, Chris has to come to terms with his own empty nest and challenge himself to move forward with a new relationship. This is a subtle depiction of the meaning of family and motherhood, and of the search for your true soul.

The world of this novel moves back in time as the layers are peeled away to reveal the truth about a long-ago family tragedy that impacts the characters' lives for years after. Beginning with a young college student haunted by her own choices and ending with the surprisingly serene image of an aging woman looking back on her turbulent life, the story encompasses a panorama of events set against the changing social backdrop of the middle years of the 20th century.

Srikkanth Bhattacharya is a quintessential gay bachelor and perfectly happy about it—until he gets a call from the local hospital telling him his best friend died in childbirth. Sri had agreed to provide the sperm to make Jill's dream of motherhood come true, but he'd never expected to have to make decisions for a baby girl. He intends to place her with an adoptive family, but once he sees her, Sri can’t bring himself to do it, so now he’s struggling to learn how to deal with a newborn.

From the author of the beloved novel Three Junes comes a rich and commanding story about the accidents, both grand and small, that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie Duquette, openhearted yet stubborn, devotes most of her passionate attention to her Greenwich Village bakery and...

Michael Thomas Ford Mike Monaghan is the bartender at the Engine Room, a meeting place for the small but thriving community of gay men in Cold Falls, New York. As Mike pours beer, wipes glasses and hears everything, he's also witness to the men who come here looking for what they need--sex, direction, friendship, spiritual fulfillment, and love. People like: Stephen Darby--As an accountant, he knows many secrets. But Stephen has his own secret, one he's never been able to share with anyone close to him.

When a car accident leaves photographer Burke Crenshaw in need of temporary full-time care, he finds himself back in the one place no forty-year-old chooses to be--his childhood bedroom. There, in the Vermont home where he grew up, Burke begins the long process of recuperation, and watches as his widowed father finds happiness in a new relationship that's a constant reminder of everything Burke wants and lacks. Exploring local history, Burke discovers an intriguing series of letters from a Civil War soldier to his fianc.

In The Good Neighbor, Rory Fallon is walking his dog along the streets of the exclusive Venetian Vistas neighborhood when he notices activity at the house next door. New neighbors have arrived in the form of Austin and Meg Harden, along with their two children. Before long, the Hardens and Rory and his partner Bruno have formed a strange, sometimes symbiotic relationship, bringing up questions of love and marriage, trust and temptation.

In 2000, Douglas A. Martin burst onto the American literary scene with his sexy debut novel, Outline of My Lover. Following up with three more books, including Branwell, a novel of the Bront brother, Martin has established himself as an acclaimed and distinctive American writer of the new century. His semi-autobiographical novel Once You Go Back is about growing up in a strained working-class household transplanted to the South.