Family Life Fiction

Emma is not thrilled with always having to rearrange her schedule so she can babysit her younger brother, Jake. Now Emma's parents have broken some news that really threatens to push Emma over the edge - since Emma and Jake are going to the same day camp this summer, she's expected to sit with Jake on the bus. Not only does this mean Emma can't hang out with her friends, but she also has to comfort Jake - who has a serious issue with motion sickness.

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.

Loretha Curry’s life is full. A little crowded sometimes, but full indeed. On the eve of her 68th birthday, she has a booming beauty-supply empire, a gaggle of lifelong friends, and a husband whose moves still surprise. True, she’s carrying a few more pounds than she should be, but Loretha is not one of those women who think her best days are behind her - and she’s determined to prove wrong her mother, her twin sister, and everyone else with that outdated view of aging wrong. It’s not all downhill from here.

Fifteen-year-old Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. She was beloved by her parents, friends, and teachers. She and her boyfriend made a teenage golden couple. She was days away from an idyllic summer vacation, with her whole life ahead of her. And then she was gone. Now her mother, Laurel Mack, is trying to put her life back together.

When a Republican party wins the General Election, they strip the royal family of everything and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands. Exchanging caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the Queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. Is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance or deep down are they really just like everyone else?

For much of her life, Sally Holt has been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally’s questions about life, about love, and about Billy Barnes, a rising senior and local basketball star who mans the concession stand at the town pool. The girls have been fascinated by Billy ever since he jumped off the roof in elementary school, but Billy has never shown much interest in them until the summer before Sally begins eighth grade.

Lizzy Moon never wanted Moon Girl Farm. Eight years ago, she left the land that nine generations of gifted healers had tended, determined to distance herself from the whispers about her family’s strange legacy. But when her beloved grandmother Althea dies, Lizzy must return and face the tragedy still hanging over the farm’s withered lavender fields: the unsolved murders of two young girls, and the cruel accusations that followed Althea to her grave.

Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance.

College admissions season at Seattle's Elliott Bay Academy is marked by glowing acceptances from top-tier institutions and students as impressive as their parents are ambitious. But when Stanford alerts the school it's allotting only one spot to EBA for their incoming class, three mothers discover the competition is more cutthroat than they could have imagined.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time.

This is the thrilling story of how a hurricane destroyed the wild herds of Assateague, and how strength and love helped rebuild them. Misty of Chincoteague has been delighting millions since its publication in 1947. Like the favorite classic, this sequel features siblings Paul and Maureen Beebe's special relationship with their ponies, and is filled with fascinating horse lore and amusing regional color.

Justin Somper, internationally acclaimed author of young adult fiction, returns with the exciting sequel to the thrilling Vampirates: Demons of the Ocean. This swashbuckling adventure takes the bold seafaring twins,Connor and Grace, across the treacherous oceans where the notorious vampirates prowl.

Someone is shooting horses, and Sadie is determined to find out who it is. That is until she begins to suspect that Mark, her boyfriend, may be involved. Will Sadie discover the truth? Will it be too hard to bear?

Louisa Clark arrives in New York ready to start a new life, confident that she can embrace this new adventure and keep her relationship with Ambulance Sam alive across several thousand miles. She is thrown into the world of the super-rich Gopniks: Leonard and his much younger second wife, Agnes, and a never-ending array of household staff and hangers-on. Lou is determined to get the most out of the experience and throws herself into her job and New York life within this privileged world.

In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees.

Several things about 14-year-old Georgia Nicolson's life are very wrong. Her bedroom smells like her little sister probably peed somewhere, but she can?t find where. Angus, her enormous cat, keeps terrorizing Mrs. Next Door's poodle. Dad's gone off to look for work in New Zealand. And one of her friends has rated Georgia's nose a zero on a scale from 1-10. But what's really driving her crazy is that Sex God Robbie doesn't give her the time of day.

Popular author Katherine Applegate has won a devoted following for her Roscoe Riley Rules series, which features a loveable youngster who has his own guidelines for getting by in life. Roscoe has already learned not to glue his friends to chairs, not to steal from bullies, and not to swap his sweaters for dogs. But when his class plans a field trip to an apple orchard, he gets himself into his stickiest situation yet—and learns a new rule in the process.

Alice Love is 29, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child. So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym and is whisked off to the hospital, where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over - she’s getting divorced, she has three kids, and she’s actually 39 years old. Alice must reconstruct the events of a lost decade and find out whether it’s possible to reconstruct her life at the same time.

Jack, his genius siblings Ava and Matt, and inventor Dr. Hank Witherspoon travel to the Hawaiian island home of Ashley Hawking, a technology billionaire. Hawking and engineer Rosa Morris have built a revolutionary electricity plant that harvests energy from the deep ocean, but someone has been sabotaging the project. In their search for the culprit, Jack and crew navigate an unusual world of characters and suspects, including Hawking and her obnoxiously intelligent son.

Twelve-year-old Myrtle Hardcastle has a passion for justice and a highly unconventional obsession with criminal science. Armed with her father’s law books and her mum’s microscope, Myrtle studies toxicology and keeps abreast of the latest developments in crime scene analysis. When her next-door neighbor, a wealthy spinster and eccentric breeder of rare flowers, dies under mysterious circumstances, Myrtle seizes her chance. With her unflappable governess, Miss Ada Judson, by her side, Myrtle takes it upon herself to prove Miss Wodehouse was murdered.