Showing titles in Family Life

'It's like ice cream, Mr Flynn,' Bertie continued. 'When you have ice cream, you need to eat it straight away, otherwise it melts. If there are people who haven't got any, you should share it, if you can.' When despair for the world grows, Bertie's theory of ice cream reminds us that it's the simple pleasures in life that we should hold onto.

One winter's afternoon on Hampstead Heath in 1980, Elise Morceau meets Constance Holden and quickly falls under her spell. Connie is bold and alluring, a successful writer whose novel is being turned into a major Hollywood film. Elise follows Connie to LA, a city of strange dreams and swimming pools and late-night gatherings of glamorous people. But whilst Connie thrives on the heat and electricity of this new world where everyone is reaching for the stars and no one is telling the truth, Elise finds herself floundering.

Joan Liang's life is a series of surprising developments: she never thought she would leave Taiwan (and for all places, California), nor did she expect her first marriage to implode - especially as quickly and spectacularly as it did. She definitely did not expect to fall in love with an older, wealthy American and become his fourth wife and mother to his youngest children. Through all this she asks herself the question familiar to so many of us: what are we living for? And are we ever truly satisfied?

You know what's best for your child. Don't you? Riley Pieterson is an adventurous girl with lots of questions. There's plenty she doesn't know yet: What a human brain looks like. All the constellations in the night sky. Why others can't see her the way she sees herself. When Riley confides in her parents - Sally and Theo - that she feels uncomfortable in her own skin, a chain of events begins that changes their lives forever. Sally wants to support her daughter by helping her be who she dreams of being. Theo resists; he thinks Riley is a seven-year-old child pushing boundaries.

Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world. For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time, and in a country, where the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.

Lewis Madigan is young, gay, out of work, and getting antsy when he’s roped into providing end-of-life care for his insufferable homophobic neighbor, Chester Wheeler. Lewis doesn’t need the aggravation, just the money. The only requirements: run errands, be on call, and put up with a miserable old churl no one else in Buffalo can bear. After exchanging barbs, bickering, baiting, and pushing buttons, Chester hits Lewis with the big ask. Lewis can’t say no to a dying wish.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white and her white husband knows nothing of her past.

Caught between his well-meaning yet misapprehending family, his boisterous friends, and his self-assured partner Ben, Elom struggles to fit in. All he ever wants is to feel understood – but what does it mean to live authentically when the only thing changing faster than the world around you is the world within? Moving between Accra, Glasgow, London, and the islands of the outer Hebrides, Selali Fiamanya’s extraordinary debut asks what it means to love and be loved in return. Before We Hit the Ground is an intimate portrait of a family, and one man’s struggle to find his place.

It’s 2022, and Heron has just had the sort of visit to the doctor that turns a life upside down. He’s an old man, stuck in the habits of a quiet life. Telling Maggie, his only daughter, and the person his life has revolved around for so long, seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about the diagnosis, and he can’t tell her all the other things he’s been keeping from her all these years either.

Joyful, defiant and dazzling, this is the story of Rafi Aziz—a Northern boy dreaming of his name up in lights. It's 1981 in the suburbs of Blackburn and, as Rafi's mother reminds him daily, the family moved here from Pakistan to give him the best opportunities. But Rafi longs to follow his own path. Flamboyant, dramatic and musically gifted, he wants to be a Bollywood star.

Eighteen years old, pregnant and working as a pizza delivery girl, our dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She’s grieving the death of her father, avoiding her loving boyfriend and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighbourhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickle-covered pizzas for her son’s happiness.

Thirty years ago, sixteen-year-old David had his worst fears come true when he came out to his family and was rejected. Devastated and alone, David vowed to always help others in need. So, when David sees a woman crying outside his florist one afternoon, he feels compelled to ask if she's okay.​​ Meg is newly engaged to the love of her life, Hannah. Meg was hoping her conservative parents could find it in their hearts to support their marriage and invited them to help choose her wedding flowers. But she has been waiting at the florist for hours and her parents haven’t shown up.

Rachel Saunders knows gossip is the price you pay for a rural lifestyle and outstanding schools. The latest town scandal is her divorce - and the fact that her new girlfriend has moved into the family home. Laura Spence lives in a poky bedsit on the wrong side of town. She and her son, Max, don’t really belong, and his violent tantrums are threatening to expose the very thing she’s trying to hide. When the local school introduces a new inclusive curriculum, Rachel and Laura find themselves on opposite sides of a fearsome debate.

When Rosie and Jules discover a ground-breaking clinical trial that enables two women to have a female baby, they jump at the chance to make history. Fear-mongering politicians and right-wing movements are quick to latch on to the controversies surrounding Ovum-to-Ovum (o-o) technology and stoke the fears of the public. What will happen to the numbers of little boys born? Is there a sinister conspiracy to eradicate men at play?

Jack Jr woke up from a two-year coma with a sore neck, a brand-new ex-fiancée and the distinct feeling he'd missed something big. Like, global pandemic big. Reluctantly returning to New Jersey, and a kitchen job at the sushi restaurant his family runs, he finds himself suddenly dependent on his dysfunctional and very estranged Asian-American family: his headstrong fishmonger father, Jack Sr; his recovering alcoholic brother, James; and his rebellious teenage nephew, Juno.

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup: bringing an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDs epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying, and after his friend Nico's funeral, he finds his partner is infected and that he might even have the virus himself. The only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Hanne is nearly 15, and the domestic world of womanhood is quickly closing in on her. A child of nature, she yearns instead for the rush of the river, the wind dancing around her. Hanne finds little comfort in the local girls, and friendship doesn't come easily, until she meets Thea and she finds in her a kindred spirit and finally, acceptance. Hanne's family are Old Lutherans, and in her small village hushed worship is done secretly—this is a community under threat.

Luke Livingstone is a respected solicitor, a father and grandfather, a pillar of the community. Yet Luke is struggling with an unbearable secret, and it's threatening to destroy him. All his life, Luke has hidden the truth about himself and his identity. It's a truth so fundamental that it will shatter his family and leave him outcast. But to continue living, he must become the person - the woman - he knows himself to be, whatever the cost.

In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for everyone, but it is on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact. As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance, and as reputations rise and fall, the events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story.

Set in Ireland in the 1990s, Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship tells the story of the Devereux family. Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen have come together after years of strife and reached an uneasy truce. Helen’s adored brother, Declan, is dying. Two friends join him and the women in a crumbling old house by the sea, where the six of them, from different generations and with different beliefs, must listen to and come to terms with one another.