Showing titles in Family Life

Satellite Street is woven through with the theme of transitions. Paul Marden is grappling with the way that a sudden, devastating illness and his slow recovery have made him reevaluate what "normal" is for a man in his 60s who grew up in a time of change that promised better days than the ones he is now living through. Another character's transition involves both gender and spirit; Lelee was born male and wanted to transition to female, but the process has been hindered by heart issues. Lelee also believes that she can speak to the dead, although she is skeptical.

Jenn Henderson is proud of the church-centered life she's created for her family. She prays each morning, attends worship every Sunday, and confidently takes up the struggle to defend traditional marriage when she learns marriage licenses are being issued to gays and lesbians in nearby San Francisco. But the certainty that she is living right falters after her teenage son, Josh, swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. Her fear deepens when she discovers that Josh struggles with same-sex attraction. If she's living right, how can Josh be gay?

The heat is oppressive and storms are brewing in Brighton in the summer of 1982. Little Gold, a boyish girl on the brink of adolescence, is struggling with the reality of her broken family and a home descending into chaos. Her only refuge is the tree at the end of her garden. Into her fractured life steps elderly neighbour, Peggy Baxter. The connection between the two is instant, but just when it seems that Little Gold has found solace, outsiders appear who seek to take advantage of her frail family in the worst way possible.

Cynthia is 21, bored and desperately waiting for something big to happen. Unemployed and living with her father, her existence is self-absorbed yet meaningless; her days absorbed by reality TV, social media and an obsession with her striking fitness instructor Anahera. When Cynthia suggests they run away together, it’s not long before Anahera arrives at her door, ready to throw in the towel on her job and her marriage.

Beatrice and Henry - the parents of the protagonist of Dale Peck’s debut novel, Martin and John—are first drawn together when the teenage Henry is battling a brain tumor he believes will soon claim his life. But forty years later they’re still a couple, in a story that moves from Long Island to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and from love to hate and back again.

James Ramsay is twenty-one years old and he has just inherited a building in New York City. After the death of his estranged mother, he finds that he is now the owner of No. 1 Dutch Street - a five-story brownstone near the World Trade Center. As James takes up residence there, trying to figure out his next move, he gets to know the only other tenant: an elderly black woman named Nellydean. Under a mounting tide of taxes, James finds himself faced with a stark choice.

Tiny McAllister never thought she’d get married. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she didn’t think girls from Connecticut married other girls. Yet here she is with Caroline, the love of her life, at their destination wedding on the Bermuda coast. In attendance - their respective families and a few choice friends. The conflict-phobic Tiny hopes for a beautiful weekend with her bride-to-be. But as the weekend unfolds, it starts to feel like there’s a skeleton in every closet of the resort.

Ray Shepard is a wealthy architect who has mystified his friends by marrying Evelyn, a woman who works at a nail salon. Evelyn, in turn, hides a secret past about her former life in the circus, her ex-husband's mysterious death, and the colorful tattoos she carefully conceals under her clothes. When Evelyn starts to cave under the pressure of living in Ray's rarified world, she suggests they take in Ingrid, a 16-year-old girl with blue hair, a pet iguana, and no place to stay for the summer.

Two years after his partner, Francesco, died, 28-year-old Kevin Doyle is dusting off his one good suit jacket for yet another funeral, yet another loss in their close-knit group. They had all been young, beautiful, and living the best days of their lives, though they didn't know it. That was before New York City began to feel like a war zone, its horrors somehow invisible, and ignored by the rest of the world. Some people might insist that Francesco is in a better place now, but Kevin definitely isn't.

Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.

The first collection of short fiction from Lambda Award-winning novelist Dale Peck spans 25 years of writing, including two O. Henry Award winners and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. The stories in What Burns examine the extremes of desire against a backdrop of family, class, and mortality.

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions quickly escalate between them and their religious neighbors. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope.

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.

Meet the hapless Jeremy: a man in his late 50s, he scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of "Nathalie Cray". When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside. Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family's checkered past.

At age 33, Penelope “Pepper” Bradford has no career, no passion, and no children. Her intrusive parents still treat her like a child. Moving into the Chelmsford Arms with her fiancé Rick, an up-and-coming financier, and joining the co-op board give her some control over her life - until her parents take a gut dislike to Rick and urge Pepper to call off the wedding. When, the week before the wedding, she glimpses a trail of desperate text messages from Rick’s obsessed female client, Pepper realizes that her parents might be right.

An emotional, page-turning read about love, family and the secrets we keep, for fans of Amanda Prowse, Ayisha Malik and Balli Kaur Jaswal. Shortlisted for The Goldsboro Books Contemporary Romantic Novel Award 2020. It was the perfect marriage... until they fell in love. After attending Oxford University, Chaya is torn between her duty to family and her life in the UK since her traditional Sri Lankan parents want her to settle down. Gimhana is hiding his sexuality from his family, and it's getting harder and harder to turn down the potential brides his parents keep finding for him.

À la mort de sa mère, Youssef, un professeur marocain exilé en France depuis un quart de siècle, revient à Salé, sa ville natale, à la demande de ses sœurs, pour liquider l'héritage familial. À travers lui, les voix du passé résonnent et l'interpellent, dont celle de Najib, son ami et amant de jeunesse au destin tragique, happé par le trafic de drogue et la corruption d'un colonel de l'armée du roi Hassan II.

Die Chicagoer Ärztin Karen ist über vierzig, gehbehindert und seit dem Tod ihrer Ehefrau alleinerziehende Mutter eines kleinen Sohnes. In ihrer Trauer wird sie nach langer Funkstille überraschend von ihrer alten Freundin Janet nach San Francisco eingeladen, wo die beiden schnell zu ihrer früheren Freundschaft und Vertrautheit zurückfinden. Völlig unverhofft trifft Karen dann bei einem Stadtbummel Kaylee wieder – die Frau, in die sie sich vor Jahren Hals über Kopf verliebt hat. Die alten Gefühle flammen wieder auf und die beiden Frauen beginnen erneut eine leidenschaftliche Romanze.

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.

When Olive receives a letter in the post from the father of her daughter - American soldier, Joe - she is shocked. Not only is he losing his sight and, after years of no contact, suddenly wanting to reconnect, but Olive has to decide whether or not to reveal that she has been lying all these years to the man she married - who believes himself to be Joanna's father. When her old friend, Josh, comes back into her life, they rekindle a spark Olive thought was long-dormant. But can she trust the man who kept so many secrets from her in the past?