Showing titles in Family Life

From the author of the Seven Sisters series, The Angel Tree is Lucinda Riley's compelling mystery of family secrets and forgotten pasts on the sweeping pastures of south-east Wales. Read by the award-winning actor Juliet Stevenson (Truly, Madly, Deeply) 'Sweeping, absorbing, beautifully written...

'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.

Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the...

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.

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.

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.

Polly Manaia is living in Sydney's notorious Kings Cross, working as an exotic dancer. She's desperate to bring her young daughter to live with her, but beneath her brash confidence lie dark secrets which threaten to drag her under. Gina is excited to live with her mum again. She's mature for an eleven-year-old, but can this young girl cope with Polly's demons? Rhoda and Star, transgender performers and Polly's flatmates, bring stability to Polly and Gina's lives. Yet this unlikely little family will find themselves threatened in more ways than one.

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.

When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals and have politicians, doctors and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges listeners into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they'll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who's never met another deaf person before, Austin, the school's golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing and February, the headmistress, who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late 20s, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born - a history whose epicentre is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class and masculinity.

Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them…in small doses, with their parents there to handle the tears and tricky questions. So when tragedy strikes and Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian, he is, honestly, overwhelmed.

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF 'BOOK OF THE YEAR' AND 'DEBUT OF THE YEAR' AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER 'An amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.' – The judges of the Booker Prize 'Douglas Stuart has written a first...

Megan has a holiday coming up in the south of France with her beloved dad - it's just a shame he will be joining her in an urn, rather than wheeling a suitcase. Little does she know that her estranged mother Dawn also has a holiday planned. The two women haven't spoken for years, ever since Dawn seemingly abandoned their family and cut all ties with her daughter. Forced together after all these years, can the two women repair what has been broken for so long?

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?

Sunday Times Novel of the Year Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize A magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations. In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet...

Amanda. Katie. Melanie. Three wildly different women with one big problem – their impossible mother-in-law, Nancy. When an unexpected crisis hits the family business, the sisters-in-law find themselves navigating stormy waters. Amanda is back in town and ready to reclaim her spot at the top. Katie, the feisty outsider, knows she'll never earn Nancy’s approval – and has stopped caring. Melanie, ambitious and savvy, is more than capable of running the business, if only Nancy would loosen her iron grip.

In 1968 we meet six teens confined at the Good Shepherd—a dark and secretive institution controlled by Sisters of Charity nuns—locked away merely for being gay, pregnant, or simply unruly. Wayward Girls is a haunting but thrilling tale of hope, solidarity, and the enduring strength of young women who find the courage to break free and find redemption...and justice.

In 1990, Vijay and Indu leave India for Australia, seeking a better life for their family. But the move isn't easy on anyone. Not gentle Indu who becomes disconnected from her family and her life; nor the ambitious Vijay, who finds himself unmoored in a culture he doesn't understand. At the centre is Archana, their quiet daughter, for whom a growing understanding of her own queerness grates against the realities of her life.

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.