Literary Fiction Family

Nora Brown teaches high school English and lives a quiet life in Seattle with her husband and six-year-old daughter. But one November day, moments after dismissing her class, a girl’s face appears above the students’ desks—“a wild numinous face with startling blue eyes, a face floating on top of shapeless drapes of purples and blues where arms and legs should have been. Terror rushes through Nora’s body—the kind of raw terror you feel when there’s no way out, when every cell in your body, your entire body, is on fire—when you think you might die.”

The story begins from nine-year-old Nate's point of view, etching the details of an unbalanced mind struggling to make sense of rampant thought patterns and heightened paranoia. Enter Ashley, Nate's mother and a hardworking advertising executive concerned that she's not giving her family enough of her time - especially now that she senses something might be wrong with her son. As the story moves deftly back and forth between the two perspectives, the narrative converges to reveal one family's journey of discovery as they strive to find balance in their lives.

One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo's wife - and the only person Jessa's ever been in love with - walks out without a word.

The award-winning, “quick-witted and razor-sharp” (Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six) author of Limelight and Small Admissions returns with a funny and heartwarming summer novel about love, family drama, secrets, and second chances. “Poeppel...

Winner of Northern Lit Award Finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour Quill & Quire "Books of the Year 2016" Globe & Mail "Best Canadian Fiction of 2016" A Penguin Book Club Pick A woman goes over a waterfall, a video goes viral, a family goes into meltdown—life is about to get a lot more...

“John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort.”—The New York Times Book Review Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful...

Erica Tate wouldn't mind getting up in the morning if she enjoyed her children more. Until puberty struck, Jeffrey and Matilda were absolute darlings, but in the last year, they have become sullen, insufferable little monsters. Erica's husband, Brian, is so deeply immersed in university life--and the legs of a half-literate flower child named Wendy--that he either doesn't notice his wife's misery or simply doesn't care. Worst of all their pleasant little neighborhood is transforming into a subdivision.

A sophisticated page-turner about a wealthy New York family embroiled in a financial scandal with cataclysmic consequences. Now that he's married to Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to New York society and all of its...

On the outside, Lily Isley's life seems perfect: a wealthy husband, a ritzy gated community in Dallas, and a handsome son, AJ - a decorated marine about to be married to his love, Shea. But when a bridesmaid is murdered in AJ's apartment and he can't be found, Lily's world collapses and a long-held family secret is at risk of exposure.

It's his last year at Pine Mountain, and Ryan Dean should be focused on his future, but instead he's haunted by his past. His rugby coach expects him to fill the roles once played by his lost friend, Joey, as the rugby team's stand-off and new captain. And somehow he's stuck rooming with 12-year-old freshman Sam Abernathy, a cooking whiz with extreme claustrophobia and a serious crush on Annie Altman - aka Ryan Dean's girlfriend, for now, anyway.

Ésta es la historia de Gregory Reeves, un gringo que sobrevive en el difícil mundo de los hispanos de California. Gregory quiere llevar a la práctica el peculiar «plan infinito» que se trazó a sí mismo en su infancia. Sin embargo, para conseguirlo debe recorrer un duro camino lleno de obstáculos: la marginación social, el racismo, el brutal contraste entre pobreza y riqueza o la guerra de Vietnam.

“Adroit, precise storytelling, atmospheric and satisfying; These Days is a novel of real substance.” —Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall WINNER OF THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION 2023 One of Lit Hub’s and Zibby Owens’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025...

The unbreakable bonds of family and love are explored in this brilliant and tender story from the author of Guy's Girl. On the day she arrives in Canada for her older brother's wedding, Eliot Beck hasn't seen her family in three years. Eliot adores her big, wacky, dysfunctional collection of...

Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country - learning the local language and customs.

In this first-ever translation of Lu Yao’s Life, we meet Gao Jialin, a stubborn, idealistic, and ambitious young man from a small country village whose life is upended when corrupt local politics cost him his beloved job as a schoolteacher, prompting him to reject rural life and try to make it in the big city. Against the vivid, gritty backdrop of 1980s China, Lu Yao traces the proud and passionate Gao Jialin’s difficult path to professional, romantic, and personal fulfillment - or at least hard-won acceptance.

The Warmest December is the incredibly moving story of one Brooklyn family and the alcoholism that determined years of their lives. Narrated by Kenzie Lowe, a young woman reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, as she visits her dying father and finds that choices she once thought beyond her control are very much hers to make.

Set in Saskatchewan and the Ottawa Valley, this finely honed tale begins in 1929 with a small-town schoolteacher helping an underprivileged child learn to read - all under the watchful eye of the school's domineering, enigmatic principal. From there the story takes listeners on a mesmerizing journey probing the roots of obsession and revealing how the pains and passions of childhood follow us into adulthood and beyond.

AN AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK A diverse group of New Yorkers are brought together by the search for a missing woman—in this electric novel of secrets, connection, and community. “Cinematic, preternaturally humane, and absolutely unputdownable—I just loved it.”—Claire Lombardo, People...

A 39-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Edward Stanton lives alone on a rigid schedule in the Montana town where he grew up. His carefully constructed routine includes tracking his most common waking time (7:38 a.m.), refusing to start his therapy sessions even a minute before the appointed hour (10:00 a.m.), and watching one episode of the 1960s cop show Dragnet each night (10:00 p.m.). But when a single mother and her nine-year-old son move in across the street, Edward’s timetable comes undone....

Set on the eve of America's involvement in World War II, Kim Brooks's debut novel, The Houseguest, examines a little-known aspect of the war - namely, the network of organizations that sought to help Jews abroad by aiding in their escape to Europe and the United States.