These novels explore what happens when ordinary families must face extraordinary circumstances as well as the complex dynamics that guide the ties that bind us.
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Description: Even as young Maisie sits for a portrait with her older sisters, tragedy strikes the family. Thirty years later, friend Daniel still can’t shake his obsession with what happened.
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Description: Griffin must either move on for fight for his marriage, forgive his wife or condemn her for her betrayal, deny or face up to his part in the sudden undoing of his seemingly perfect life.
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Description: After a decade of spending a delightful summer week at their country house in New Hampshire, the members of the extended Seton family are confronted by a terrible accident, testing the values and relationships that hold them together.
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Description: A seasoned midwife in rural Vermont faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors, and the accusations of her own conscience.
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Description: Haunted by the murder of her sister four decades ago, Julie Bauer must confront the pain of the past when a mysterious phone call sheds new light on the events of that terrifying night.
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Description: An absorbing and emotionally charged page-turner of one woman’s dark past and desperate desire to keep her child.
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Description: Tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter’s spectacular demise by self-defenstration, which inaugurates ‘the year of the suicides.’
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Description: Jade longs to begin a family with her husband Max. When she discovers that Max has an illegitimate son, her life is turned upside down. She flees to her Iowa childhood home, and questions everything she thought she knew about family, love, and motherhood.
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Description: The story of two sisters, Gillian and Sally Owens, brought up by their elderly guardian aunts in a small New England town. The aunts possess magic that they in turn hand down to their nieces.
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Description: Follows a mother and daughter through post-World War II Ireland and London, demonstrating that family bonds can never be broken.
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Description: Rendered unable to speak, read, or write after a Vietnam War injury thirty years earlier, Howard Kapostash feels trapped by his disability until his high school sweetheart, recently forced into rehab, asks him to care for her nine-year-old son.
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Description: A revelatory novel of family, love, conflict, and loss chronicles the lives of diverse characters–including Luke McGavock, a man searching for a sense of purpose in life; Corinne Calloway, a mother of twins; and her husband, Russell–whose world is forever transformed by the catastrophic events of September 11th.
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Description: When a box of her dead mother’s belongings arrive on her doorstep, Samantha discovers a mystery surrounding her grandmother, and, in investigating it, comes to terms with balancing her own role as a mother with her artistic aspirations.
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Description: For Eva, the divorced and happily remarried mother of three children, and her adolescent middle child, Daisy, the death of Eva’s second husband John in a car accident turns their lives upside down.
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Description: Having moved on with her life after a friend was brutally murdered, Jo Becker is now married with a grown family, but when an old housemate moves into the neighborhood, Jo rekindles a relationship that takes her back to the past and threatens her future.
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Description: Nine years after three-year-old Ben Cappadora’s kidnapping, a twelve-year-old boy knocks at the door of the Cappadora house, looking for yardwork.
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Description: Gordon McKenna and his parents must overcome their grief as they deal with the loss of their sister and daughter by devoting themselves to the care of her one-year-old daughter. The decision of who will raise her is far from over.
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Description: Ginny and William’s peaceful life in Vermont comes to an abrupt halt as their children and grandchildren descend one summer with an assortment of adult problems. By summer’s end, the family gains new ideas of loyalty and responsibility, exposing the challenges of surviving the modern family–and the old adage, once a parent, always a parent, has never rung so true.
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Description: A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace–there is some question if it was rape–sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow.
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Description: Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Anna begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.
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Description: The budding romance between two teenaged children of two families who have been lifelong friends and neighbors culminates tragically in an abortive suicide pact, leading to a gripping courtroom drama.
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Description: District Attorney Nina Frost and her husband, Caleb, face a nightmare when they discover that their young son Nathaniel has been molested, a trauma that has left him mute, terrified, and unable to reveal the identity of his attacker.
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Description: When a baby is left on their doorstep, the lives of Lydia Blessing and Skip are transformed. Skip wants to keep the baby and raise it himself. To his surprise, Lydia wants to help. Together, they decide to keep the baby a secret between them.
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Description: After caring for her mother during her final, painful battle with cancer, Ellen Gulden discovers many surprising things about her mother’s life and finds herself accused of murdering her mother in a mercy killing.
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Description: In the wake of tragedy, Anne Davis abandons her jet-set lifestyle to return to the house where she grew up to spend a harsh New England winter hoping to find healing and solace and holding on to the precious memories of her child and her life with her husband, Matt.
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Description: The lives of four different people come together as the result of the mysterious disappearance of expectant mother Leila Jameson.
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Description: When her husband, a pilot, dies in an airplane crash off the Irish coast, Kathryn Lyons finds herself in the media spotlight as rumors abound of her husband’s shocking secret past.
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Description: A photographer who has come to a small island off the coast of New Hampshire to shoot a photo-essay about a double murder that took place there over a century ago, notices parallels between her own life and the lives of the murder victims.
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Description: A travel writer who hates to travel, and to whom “things just happen,” becomes involved with an unusual woman following the desertion of his wife.
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Description: A penetrating light on the American way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here and those who are still struggling to fit in.