Showing titles in Family Life

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is … complicated. So when her real dad - a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago - suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw.

Madurai, 1992. A young mother in a poor family, Janani is told she is useless if she can't produce a son - or worse, bears daughters. They let her keep her first baby girl, but the rest are taken away as soon as they are born. Sydney, 2019. Nila has a secret, one she's been keeping from her parents for far too long. Before she can say anything, her grandfather in India falls ill and she agrees to join her parents on a trip to Madurai - the first in over ten years.

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. “If it keeps me awake,” says Marnie's husband Rob, a farmer, “I'll have to wring its neck.” But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple's future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds—and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them—bleed into one another.

When Lena helps her teenage daughter gather sounds for her media studies project, she doesn't expect her boom-microphone to pick up a conversation between her neighbours, the Morgans. And she’s certain they are planning a crime. Her family and friends tell her that she must have misheard. After all, the Morgans are a well-respected, upstanding couple in their early sixties. They’ve never been in trouble with the law. Yet Lena can’t stop thinking about it. Because what if she hasn’t misheard? What if she can prevent something awful happening?

The brilliant new novel from the author of the New York Times best seller Everything I Never Told You. Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned - from the layout of the winding roads to the colours of the houses to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead.

Heads always turned when Rose McCarthy walked into a room. Nearly six feet tall, she was ramrod straight, and impeccably put together with faultless style, long graceful legs, her snow-white hair cut in a chin-length rounded cap. Her piercing blue eyes missed nothing. She could terrify anyone with a few well-chosen, soft-spoken, eloquent words, or comfort and delight a young employee with generous praise. For 25 years, she had been the legendary editor in chief of Mode magazine.

The Leonides are one big happy family living in a sprawling, ramshackle mansion - until the head of the household, Aristide, is murdered with a fatal barbiturate injection. Suspicion naturally falls on the old man's young widow, 50 years his junior. But the murderer hasn't reckoned on the tenacity of Charles Hayward, fiancé of the late millionaire's granddaughter.

From the master of tragicomedy and award-winning author of Skippy Dies: a tour de force new novel about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is (maybe) ending. Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking, a state-of-the-nation novel about one unhappy family in the midst of meltdown.

1840: 23 years after the death of her famous sister Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury, and the home of her family’s friends, the Fowles. She knows that, in some dusty corner of the sprawling vicarage, there is a cache of family letters which hold secrets she is desperate should not be revealed. As Cassandra recalls her youth and her relationship with her brilliant yet complex sister, she pieces together buried truths about Jane’s history and her own.

Olive, Again follows the blunt, contradictory yet deeply lovable Olive Kitteridge as she grows older, navigating the second half of her life as she comes to terms with the changes - sometimes welcome, sometimes not - in her own existence and in those around her. Olive adjusts to her new life with her second husband, challenges her estranged son and his family to accept him, experiences loss and loneliness, witnesses the triumphs and heartbreaks of her friends and neighbours in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine - and, finally, opens herself to new lessons about life.

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband—and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a decades-long partnership.

The entrancing story of a reclusive Hollywood starlet as she reflects on her relentless rise to the top and the long-held secrets the public could never imagine - from the best-selling author of Daisy Jones & The Six. Reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now?

Hester and Harriet are reluctantly driving to visit relatives on Christmas Day when they come across a young woman hiding with her baby in a bus shelter. Seeing the perfect excuse for returning to their own warm hearth, the sisters insist on bringing Daria and Milo home with them. But with the arrival of a sinister stranger looking for a girl with a baby, Hester and Harriet's carefully crafted peace and quiet quickly begins to fall apart....

After escaping her parents’ unhappy marriage to sleepy Cranbridge a long time ago, Belle Clarke dreams of staying at The Black Swan Inn forever. But with the rundown inn threatened with closure, Belle may be forced to leave, unless a buyer can be found...quickly. So, when her oldest friend, Pete Kennedy, returns from working abroad with a plan to save the Inn, Belle should be overjoyed. The trouble is, Pete has some rather radical ideas for the renovation which Belle disagrees with.

The story of a woman's struggle for independence from an abusive husband. Helen 'Graham' has returned to Wildfell Hall in flight from a disastrous marriage and to protect her young son from the influence of his father. Exiled to the desolate moorland mansion, she adopts an assumed name and earns her living as a painter. Gilbert Markham, a local man intrigued by the beautiful young 'widow' offers his friendship but becomes distrustful when her reclusive behaviour sparks rumours and speculation.

When Zara brings an injured owl to Owl's Lodge, its frosty, reclusive owner is far from welcoming. Despite hostilities, there's a connection that neither could ever have prepared themselves for. As they discover a shared passion, a new friendship blossoms, but both Zara and Snowy are used to shutting people out. Can they both find the courage to open up and the strength to move on from their pasts? And what could this mean for their future happiness?

Every murder case starts with a suspect. What if the suspect is your daughter? Would you believe her, or the evidence against her? The father believes his daughter has been framed.The mother believes she is hiding something. The daughter believes they have no idea what she’s truly capable of.... There are three sides to the story. And the truth will shatter this family to pieces.

1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event that tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past. Nearly 80 years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son, Henry, brings back memories she would rather forget.

The mystery of Elizabeth Keane's father is one that has never been solved by the people of Buncarragh - not for lack of speculation. Her mother, Patricia, had been assumed a spinster until she began dating a mysterious man from out of town and within months had left Buncarragh and had married. Less than two years later, Patricia was back, with a new baby in her arms but no new husband by her side and unbendingly silent about her recent past. A secret she would take with her to her grave.

Being thirty-something, broke, divorced and in a cold war with her ten-year-old son is a lot, but Jo's handling it. Just. At least she is until her job at the Natural History Museum is put in jeopardy. An invitation to dig up dinosaur bones on a remote Queensland sheep station arrives at just the right time. It's not her first trip to Yindi Creek, but it's not as though anyone will remember her from fifteen years ago ... And by anyone, of course, she means the pilot she had that fling with. The fling that taught her she's far safer sticking to science.