Showing titles in Family Life

It’s the final years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Bríd and her sister, Ina, try to maintain a stable life in a divided country. Pushed by her mother’s fanaticism and a family tragedy, Bríd joins the IRA and makes a devastating choice. Frightened and guilt ridden, she flees, leaving behind Ireland and her family for America. Years later, her guilt and tragic history still buried, Bríd is an overprotective mother raising her sensitive daughter, Bernie, in Southern California.

Growing up on a homophobic council estate in South Wales with an abusive veteran father made Jamie Taylor’s life intolerable. Her only release was feeding her obsession for rich kid Heather Gardner.

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.

Bastien was lucky to spend a lifetime with Dayton, but now, after decades, Dayton is gone. Bastien isn’t sure how he can go on without the love of his life, but then two young boys knock on his door and announce they are his grandsons.

In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and share a bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and underserved neighborhoods. The three boys are an inseparable trio but conspicuous: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Youssef shares everything with his brothers except for one secret: He sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shape-shifting familiar he calls Brother.

There is plenty to distract Marie Santora when she comes home to lick her wounds after the end of her relationship. Not least of which is her sister Lisa’s plan to transform a rundown campground into a gay and lesbian paradise—complete with a five-star Italian restaurant—with the help of a contractor who just happens to be the woman who broke their brother’s heart.

Husbands Thomas and Matt are enjoying a second-chance marriage after coming out, leaving their wives, and finding happiness in a summer cottage on the southern coast of Maine. They’ve kept a tenuous peace with their exes. Thomas toils in the garden. There is an ease to their love. This is the way life should be. But it’s not long before their three children—each nearing adulthood and fleeing personal crises of their own—descend on their fathers’ bliss. The two-bedroom getaway has just enough space for Thomas and Matt’s future. Now they must make room for the past, and all its drama.

In the aftermath of a flood that washes away much of a small Tennessee town, evangelical preacher Asher Sharp offers shelter to two gay men. In doing so, he starts to see his life anew - and risks losing everything: his wife, locked into her religious prejudices; his congregation, which shuns Asher after he delivers a passionate sermon in defense of tolerance; and his young son, Justin, caught in the middle of what turns into a bitter custody battle. With no way out but ahead, Asher takes Justin and flees to Key West, where he hopes to find his brother, Luke, whom he'd turned against years ago after Luke came out.

In his novel based on the extraordinary life of the gay brother of Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Russell re-creates the rich and changing world in which Sergey, his family, and friends lived; from wealth and position in prerevolutionary Russia, to the halls of Cambridge University, and the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But it is the honesty and vulnerability of Sergey, our young gay narrator, that hook the reader.

Eighteen-year-old aspiring comic Joey Rossi just found out his boyfriend has been cheating on him for the past 10 months. But what did he expect? Joey was born with an addiction to toxic jerks - something he inherited from his lovably messy, wisecracking, Italian-American spitfire of a mom (and best friend): 34-year-old Gia Rossi. When Gia’s latest non-relationship goes up in flames only a day later, the pair’s New Jersey apartment can barely contain their rage. In a misguided attempt at revenge, Joey and Gia inadvertently commit a series of crimes and flee the state....

Lei Ling Wen is lonely. Bored of her demanding after-school schedule of tuition, study and violin lessons, she struggles to see eye to eye with her strict Chinese-Malaysian mother. When Lei Ling is befriended by elegant, worldly socialite Gigi Nu, she is enchanted by the realm of luxury and freedom that suddenly opens up to her. Gigi encourages Lei Ling to flout her routines and treats her to designer products and expensive meals, and soon Lei Ling finds herself caught between two lives, and increasingly at odds with her exasperated mother.

Robin and Kessie have been best friends since childhood when their families fractured. Now, in their mid-thirties, they are keen to have children themselves, but each faces daunting obstacles. In stepping up to support each other, they begin to negotiate unconventional routes towards motherhood, challenging assumptions about ‘normal’ family relationships along the way.

In the second novel of the 'Choosing to remember' series, Jerome Clarkson takes a swan dive into his past and the trauma he's carried for far too long. Jerome grew up in a very toxic and unloving environment, unable to escape the torture. His mother had him at just 13 and went on to have seven more children, that she took her frustrations out on constantly. Jerome was berated as child for being different and his mother often abused him because she believed that he was gay. From the moment his mother first beat him, Jerome felt the need to please his mother and prove her suspicions to be wrong.

Living together seems an impossible task for four radically different boys, but the tragedies that have touched the lives of each work to bring them together. Family is where you find it.

You Must Remember This is an eloquent jumble of a family story, as experienced by Grace, an elderly woman with dementia trying to get her moorings in a worsening storm. It contemplates the perils of remembering and forgetting, making your own way in the world and how we seem bound to repeat the patterns of the past. Most profoundly it's about sensing what it's like to live on while your faculties dim, and about finding peace.

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.

Home, for Noah York, is Oakland, New Hampshire, the sleepy little town where Noah's mother, Virginia, had a psychotic breakdown and Noah got beaten to a pulp as a teenager. Then there were the good times—and Noah's not sure which ones are more painful to recall. Now thirty-seven and eking out a living as an artist in Providence, Rhode Island, Noah looks much the same—and swears just as colorfully—as he did in high school.

Newlywed Rosie has grown disenchanted with NYC. Inspired by Instagram ads, she starts thirsting for a rural life upstate–one full of beauty and simplicity. Willing to do anything for Rosie's happiness, her tech-bro husband, Jordan, acquiesces to her vision for the future, and they offer–well above asking price–on a beautiful, historic fixer-upper in the Hudson Valley. But when Jordan suddenly loses his job on the day they close the deal, the couple is forced to rent out the property's dilapidated outbuilding.

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.

Brendan and Casper have lived most of their lives on a Christmas tree farm in Verona, Indiana, but when Brendan is offered the position of head football coach at Indiana University, he can’t resist. The couple leaves all that they know behind and moves to Bloomington to begin a new chapter of their lives. Brendan is living his dream, but Casper finds something missing. Soon, he fills the void by becoming the big brother of a troubled youth, and a new chapter of Brendan and Casper’s life begins.