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

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.

After almost 20 years together, Stella and Simon are starting to run into problems. An up-and-coming rock musician when they first met, Simon has been clinging to dreams of fame even as the possibility of it has grown dimmer, and now that his band might finally be on the brink again, he wants to go on the road, leaving Stella behind.

There's no road map for what to do when your husband dies - when he jumps off a bridge to escape mistakes that he made, or even welcomed, into your lives. But Lily doesn't need to consult a map for this particular part of her journey; she knows the way back to the small town she left behind. With a precocious seven-year-old who reminds her too much of his father tucked safely in the back seat, Lily leaves New York with everything she owns packed in a U-Haul, including memories that come in waves like fields along the highway and an envelope she is too afraid to open.

Edie - smart, self-assured, beautiful - always worked hard. She worked as a teller at a bank, she worked to save her first marriage, and later, she worked to raise her daughter even as her second marriage came apart. Really, Edie just wanted a good life, but everywhere she turned, her looks defined her. Two brothers fought over her. Her second husband became unreasonably possessive and jealous. Her daughter resented her. And now, as a grandmother, Edie finds herself harassed by a younger man. It’s been a lifetime of proving that she is allowed to exist in her own sphere.

One night Don, a father of three, leaves his house for an evening stroll only to wake up the next morning stoned and sleeping in a hammock next to a young woman he barely knows. His wife, Claire, leaves the house on this same night to go on a midnight run - only to find herself bumming cigarettes and beer outside the all-night convenience store. As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, this quotidian town's adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused.

Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband Wayne beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear - the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly.

The story is told primarily through Andre's voice, but we also see things through the voices and points of view of his mother Ruby, a hard-working medical secretary, his older sister Nina, his mostly not-there-usually-drunk-and-high father Eddie, a halfhearted reggae musician, and Reggie and Smoke, the kingpins of competing drug crews.

When Clara Winter left her rural Adirondack Mountain town for college, she never looked back. Her mother, Tamar, a fiercely independent but loving woman who raised Clara on her own, all but pushed her out the door, forcing Clara to build a new life for herself, far from her roots, far from her high-school boyfriend, and far from the life she had known. Now more than a decade has passed, and Clara, a successful writer, has been summoned home.

Claudio and Mathilde Simone, once romantic bohemians hopelessly enamored with each other, find themselves nestled in domesticity in New York, running a struggling vinyl record store and parenting three daughters - Natasha, Lucy, and Carly - as best they can. With prose that is as keen and illuminating as it is whimsical and luminous, debut author Christine Reilly tells the unusual love story of this family.

During a snowy Cleveland February, newlyweds Muneer and Saeedah are starting their lives in America and expecting their first child. But Muneer harbors a secret: The word divorce has begun whispering itself in his ear. Soon, their marriage will end, and Muneer will return to Saudi Arabia, while Saeedah remains in Cleveland with their daughter, Hanadi. The more time she shares with her daughter, the more Saeedah wants to keep her close, and before long, her fear of losing Hanadi leads Saeedah to think that she and her daughter have no choice but to hide.