Showing titles in Family Life

Mit einer Pistole in den Händen und der Leiche des Vaters auf dem Rücken des Pferdes sind die chinesischen Waisenkinder Lucy und Sam auf der Flucht durch die Prärie. Es ist ein unbarmherziges Land, von Bisonknochen übersät und dem Goldrausch verfallen. Die Geschwister wollen den Vater gemäß dem chinesischen Ritual begraben - mit zwei Silberdollars auf den Augen. Nur auf diese Weise kann Ba nach Hause finden. Doch wo in dieser fremden Welt ist für Lucy und Sam das Zuhause, das so unerreichbar scheint wie das versprochene Gold in den Hügeln?

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. 

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.

In the summer of 1973, teenage Ruth and her four friends are obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings and a little bit obsessed with each other. They spend the scorching summer days in the river by Ruth's grand family home, pretending to be the drowning Ophelia and recreating tableaus of other tragic mythical heroines. But by the end of the summer, real tragedy has found them. Twenty-four years later, Ruth is a wife and mother of three children and moves her family into her still-grand, but now somewhat dilapidated, childhood home following the death of her father.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing. Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table.

Saying that Benjamin Sean Quinn had "anger issues" was an understatement. For those who knew him for the shortest amount of time, his life was in order: He was physically fit, had a great job which provided him a house in the suburbs and the material things he desired, a loving, monogamous relationship, two happy, healthy daughters and an established circle of friends. In all accounts, his life seemed perfect. But to those who knew him the longest, they knew he was an idle grenade, waiting for someone to pull the pin.

Nora and Fern's relationship as mother and daughter is a tumble of love and distrust. To Nora, her daughter is an enigma - at the same time wonderful and unfindable. Fern sees her mother as treacherous - for busting up their family to move in with her lover, Jeanne. As their lives become complicated by the arrivals of a skateboarding boyfriend for Fern, a shadowy affair for Nora, a baby in need of a family, and by the failing health of Lucky, their beloved dog, this mother and daughter find their way onto a fresh footing with each other.

In this suspenseful and deeply moving novel, Michael Thomas Ford propels us beyond smiling holiday photographs and beloved anecdotes to explore the complex ties within one family - and between two very different brothers whom catastrophe will either unite or divide forever....

In The Boomerang Kid, Maura Ostryder is coming into her own, professionally and privately, as she begins her 51st year. Maura has always been the master of her own life and has reared her son, Kai (named for the Hawaiian word for sea) to be the same way. But now a grown Kai has come home, having fled emotional attachments to both a young man and a young woman, bringing with him his addiction to painkillers.

Miriam hasn't left her house in three years and cannot raise her voice above a whisper. But today she has had enough and is finally ready to rejoin the outside world. Meanwhile Ralph has made the mistake of opening a closet door only to discover with a shock that his wife, Sadie, doesn't love him and never has. And so he decides to run away.

All it took to destroy Andy Nocera's seemingly perfect life was an anonymous tryst at an Interstate rest area. Sentenced to probation and thrown out by his wife, he spends his week as a traveling salesman, and his weekends at his mother's house where no questions are asked - and no explanations are offered. To clear his record, the State of North Carolina requires Andy to complete one year of therapy without another arrest. He attends his sessions reluctantly at first, struggling to comprehend why he would risk everything.

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.