Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Family Life

Set in Iran and New York City, Dalia Sofer's second novel, Man of My Time, tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world. After decades of ambivalence about his work for the Iranian, Hamid travels to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father - who was cremated despite his religion - to honor his dying wish to be buried in Iran.

After discovering that the father she'd been told was dead is, in fact, alive, 13-year-old Rayne Houston runs away. She takes along her new friend, the Timinator, aka Tim, a young boy she found hiding behind a garbage can in her hometown of Las Vegas. Tim needs a daddy, too, so the two of them hop a bus to Illinois and begin The Daddy Quest. Nicole Houston is frantic when she discovers her daughter is gone. Her lies are coming back to haunt her, but when she told them, she believed she was doing the right thing for everyone.

For 10 years, Samantha Riggins and J. D. Kronos have convinced themselves they have the perfect relationship: no strings, no commitment, no future. All that changes when the son Sam gave up for adoption walks into her shelter - the son J.D. knows nothing about. The presence of their child breaks through all the rules they've lived by. And suddenly what Sam thought she knew about J.D. turns out to be wrong. Are the feelings they share enough to keep them together? Especially now that the biggest secret is the one Sam never saw coming?

Every Christmas Eve for the past 50 years, Ruby Harris, the owner of the historic B&B, The Christmas House, has opened her doors to strangers in need, showing them the compassion once denied to her. When Ruby invites her family home for the holidays, including her two adult grandchildren, Charlotte and Olivia, she hopes they will be able to put the past behind them. However, her plans for reconciliation implode as the women unravel secrets from the past that force them to confront the impact they've had on their dysfunctional family.

Masha remembers her childhood in the former USSR but found her life and heart in Israel. Anna was just an infant when her family fled but yearns to find her roots. When Anna is contacted by a stranger from their homeland and then disappears, Masha is called home to Milwaukee to find her.

Meet Nives: widow, Tuscan through and through, survivor. Nives recently lost her husband of 50 years. She didn’t cry when she found him dead in the pig pen, and she didn’t cry at the funeral, but now loneliness has set in. When she decides to bring her favorite chicken inside for company, she is shocked, confused, and a little bit guilty to discover that the chicken’s company is a more-than-adequate replacement for her dead husband.

Wealthy Hermosa Beach housewife Nancy Hadley is no pushover. So when her philandering husband, Roger, is caught in flagrante with an opportunistic widow on their racing yacht, Nancy sticks it to him. She tells him she wants a divorce - with the yacht, Bucephalus, part of the deal, too. Roger would rather make Nancy's life a living hell than give up his boat. But Nancy has other plans.

Cassidy Morgan's life has always followed a carefully laid track: top education, fulfilling career, and marriage to the love of her life. The next logical step was starting a family. But when a late-term miscarriage threatens to derail everything she's worked so hard for, she finds herself questioning her identity, particularly what it means to be a mother. Unable to move past her guilt and shame, she realizes there's more to fix than a broken heart.

Despite the end of her marriage, Diane still has plenty of love to give. Determined not to waste her days - that’s just not her style - she finds a job in a daycare and solace in cocktails with her best friend, Claudine, who convinces Diane her love life is not over. Diane wants romance and sees no reason why she shouldn’t have it, but she soon discovers, in her typically chaotic and hilarious manner, that the task is not as simple for a woman approaching her 50s as it is for a man.

Zoya Sahni has a great education, a fulfilling job, and a loving family (for the most part). But she is not the perfect Indian girl. She's overweight, spunky, and dark-skinned in a world that prizes the slim, obedient, and fair. At 26, she is hurtling toward her expiration date in Mumbai's arranged marriage super-mart, but when her auntie's matchmaking radar hones in on the Holy Grail of suitors - just as Zoya gets a dream job offer in New York City - the girl who once accepted her path as almost option-less must now make a choice of a lifetime.

Amelia MacQueen has lost her favorite son, Gavin, to a suspicious drowning, and she’s been awarded temporary custody of her 12-year-old daughter, Heaven, who she reluctantly takes in. The daughter of drug addicts, who has long been left to her own devices, Heaven does not appreciate her grandmother’s constant critical ministrations, and the pair quickly butt heads. She instead bonds with Uncle Daniel, Amelia's agoraphobic older son. Through the wall between their rooms, Daniel spins Celtic tales for Heaven from the Isle of Skye, where the family's ancestors lived.

The Fehler sisters wanted to be more than bug girls but growing up in a fourth-generation family pest-control business in rural Missouri, their path was fixed. The family talked about Fehler Family Exterminating at every meal, even when their mom said to separate the business from the family, an impossible task. They tried to escape work with trips to their trailer camp on the Mississippi River, but the sisters did more fighting than fishing. If only there was a son to lead rural Missouri insect control and guide the way through a crumbling patriarchy.

1962. In the middle of Brooklyn Heights sits the Starlite: boutique dress shop by day, underground women's club by night. Started by the shop's proprietor after her councilman ex-husband, Fred Abbott, ruined her reputation, Madeline's social club soon becomes a safe haven for women from all walks of life. These after-hour soirées soon bring two very different women into Madeline's life - Elaine, a British ex-pat struggling to save her marriage, and Lisa, a young stewardess whose plans for the future are suddenly upended.

The summer of 1960 was the hottest ever for Summit, Wisconsin. For kids seeking relief from the heat, there was a creek to be swum in, sprinklers to run through, and ice cream at Whitcomb's Drugstore. But for Frankie, Viv, and Biz, 11-year-old best friends, it would forever be remembered as the summer that evil paid a visit to their small town - and took their young lives as they'd known them as a souvenir.

Isolated in the aftermath of tragedy, Erin Fullarton has felt barely alive since the loss of her young daughter, Korrie. Her estranged husband, Zac, a brilliant astrophysicist, seems to be coping better. Lost in his work, he's perfecting his model of a stunning cosmological phenomenon, one he predicts will occur today. But when Erin receives a phone call from her daughter's school, the same call she received 500 days earlier when Korrie was still alive, Erin realizes something is happening. Or happening again.

Ever the prodigal son, Gavin Danvers returns to Heron’s Landing to move on from his recent divorce. With his young daughter in tow, Gavin wants to rebuild his life - alone. He’s done with love and marriage forever. Gavin’s resolve is tested when he meets his daughter’s pretty new teacher. Kat Williamson, with her sweet smile and her devotion to her students, is everything Gavin can never have. Yet when Kat begins to receive escalating threats from a mysterious stalker, Gavin vows to protect her. As he realizes he can love again, Gavin must do everything he can to protect Kat.

In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It’s a question Meg Rhys doesn’t think she’s asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister’s ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he’s trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism’s fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn.

Susan Napier's family once lived on the success of the high-end restaurants founded by her late grandfather. But bad luck and worse management has brought the business to the edge of financial ruin. Now it's up to Susan to save the last remaining restaurant: Elliot's, the flagship in Edinburgh. But what awaits Susan in the charming city of Auld Reekie is more than she bargained for. Chris Baker, her grandfather's former protégé - and her ex-boyfriend - is also heading to the Scottish capital.

A French teacher on the verge of retirement is invited to a glittering opening that showcases the artwork of his former student, who has since become a celebrated painter. This unexpected encounter leads to the older man posing for his portrait, possibly in the nude. Such personal exposure at close range entails a strange and troubling pact between artist and sitter that prompts both to reevaluate their lives.

Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young girl growing up in Cape Town during the 1980s. Her family secrets spill over into adulthood and threaten to ruin the respectable life she has built for herself. When an old childhood friend emerges after disappearing a decade earlier during a clash with apartheid riot police in the Cape Flats, where South Africa’s colored community makes its home, Grace’s memories of her childhood come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the loss that has shaped her.