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<\/a>The Accidental Favorite<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Fran Littlewood<\/p>\nVivienne and Patrick Fisher have done an excellent job raising their three daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva. They\u2019re well-adjusted women with impressive careers, caring partners, exciting hobbies, and sweet children. So it\u2019s with great anticipation that three generations of Fishers gather at a beautiful glass house in the English countryside for a weeklong celebration of Vivienne\u2019s seventieth birthday. But when Patrick\u2019s reaction to a freak accident on the first day of the trip inadvertently reveals that he has a favorite daughter, no one is prepared for the shockwaves it sends through the family.<\/em><\/p>\n Decades-old unresolved sibling rivalries are suddenly unmasked. And be it newly uncovered smoking habits, ancient crushes, or private doubts about life decisions both big and small, no one\u2019s secrets are safe. Still-tender wounds are reopened amid an audience of friends, husbands, grandchildren, and even coworkers, and as the family’s past is re-written, they find themselves suddenly unmoored.<\/em><\/p>\n In a lively, poignant examination of memory, sisterhood, and family ties, Fran Littlewood reminds us just why it is that people in glass houses shouldn\u2019t throw stones.<\/em> – Henry Holt and Co.<\/p>\n This title is also available in large print.<\/p>\n Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn\u2019t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn\u2019t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall.<\/em><\/p>\n When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian\u2019s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family\u2019s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them\u2014or herself\u2014while there\u2019s still time.<\/em><\/p>\n Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life, debut that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.<\/em> – Simon & Schuster<\/p>\n A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after one event changes their lives forever<\/em><\/p>\n When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.<\/em><\/p>\n From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis\u2019s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.<\/em> – Penguin Press<\/p>\n Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants they were adopted into different families, Clara sent to live with a successful, upper-class couple, and Dempsey with a sullen, unaffectionate city councilor. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life\u2014the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born.<\/em><\/p>\n As with most things, Clara and Dempsey cannot see eye to eye on the confounding appearance of this woman. Clara, a celebrity author with a penchant for excessive drinking and one-night stands, is all too willing to welcome the confident and temperamental Serene into her home. But cloistered Dempsey, who makes a modest living doing menial data entry work from the confines of her apartment, is dubious of the whole situation, believing this all to be the insidious ruse of a con woman. Clashing over this stranger who burrows deeper and deeper into their lives, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts\u2014together.<\/em><\/p>\n In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, \u201cHow can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?\u201d<\/em> – Liveright<\/p>\n In this taut Southern family drama, the sins of a favorite son rock a small Mississippi town.<\/em><\/p>\n Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., shepherd of the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. He owns the barbershop and the radio station, and generally keeps an iron hand on every aspect of society in Dominion, Mississippi. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy\u2014no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. But Wonderboy, his father, and all the structures in place that keep them on top are not as righteous as they seem to be. And when Wonderboy is caught off guard by an encounter with a stranger, he finds himself confronted by questions he\u2019d never imagined. His response sends shock waves through the entire community.<\/em><\/p>\n Priscilla and Diamond, two women who love these men, bear witness to their charms and bear the brunt of their choices. Through their eyes and their stories, Dominion offers an intricate, intimate view of how secrets control us, how shame stifles us, how silence implicates us, and how even love plays a role in the everyday violence and casual sins of the powerful.<\/em><\/p>\n A brilliantly crafted Black Southern family drama told with the captivating force, humor, and tenderness carried in the hearts of these women, Addie E. Citchens\u2019s Dominion wrestles with the many brutal, sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy, and studies how we might yet choose to break free.<\/em> – Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n In this unforgettable novel from the award-winning author of Brass, twins growing up in the United States in the nineties unravel larger truths about identity and sibling bonds when one of them gets wrapped up in the war in Kosovo.<\/em><\/p>\n Raised in Connecticut, adopted twins Drita and Petrit (aka Pete) had no connection to their Albanian heritage. Their lives were all about Barbie dolls, the mall, and roller skating at the local rink. Although they were inseparable during their childhood, their paths diverged once they became teenagers: Drita was a good girl with good manners who was going to attend a good college; Pete was a bad boy going nowhere fast. Even their twinhood was not enough to keep them together.<\/em><\/p>\n Fast-forward to their twenties. Drita has given up on her dreams for the future, abandoning her graduate studies to move back home and take care of their mother. She hasn\u2019t heard from Pete in three years when his girlfriend and their son unexpectedly show up without him and in need of help. Realizing that Pete\u2019s child may offer the siblings a second chance at being family, Drita becomes determined to find her brother. But what she ends up discovering\u2014about their connection to their Albanian roots, the war in Kosovo, and the story of their adoption\u2014will surprise everyone, and become what brings them together, or tears them apart for good.<\/em> – Random House<\/p>\n A darkly funny debut novel about two estranged sisters who are unknowingly thrown together by their problematic father\u2019s dying wish<\/em><\/p>\n Mickey and Arlo are half sisters. But they\u2019ve never spoken and never met. Arlo adored her father\u2014but always lived in the shadow of his magnetic personality and burdensome vices. Meanwhile, their father abandoned \u200bMickey and her mother years ago, and Mickey has hated him since. When she receives news of her father\u2019s passing, Mickey is shocked to learn that he\u2019s left her his not-inconsiderable fortune. The catch: Mickey must attend a series of therapy sessions before the money can be released.<\/em><\/p>\n Unbeknownst to either woman, the psychologist Mickey\u2019s father has ensured she meets with is her half sister, Arlo. Having cared for her beloved father on his sickbed, Arlo is devastated to discover he\u2019s cut her out of his will. She resolves to learn where the money went and why.<\/em><\/p>\n Working together as therapist and patient\u2014with no idea that they\u2019re in fact sisters\u2014Arlo and Mickey soon get under each other\u2019s skin. Arlo, eager to outrun a mistake in her professional past, is keen to redeem herself with her new client. But Mickey is far from the model patient. As Mickey\u2019s personal and professional lives spiral out of control and Arlo uncovers the truth about who her new patient really is, the sisters find themselves on a crash course that will break\u2014or save\u2014them both.<\/em> – Viking<\/p>\n A novel tracing a father\u2019s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.<\/em><\/p>\n One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.<\/em><\/p>\n Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne\u2019s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.<\/em><\/p>\n But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa\u2019s father?<\/em><\/p>\n Shifting perspectives across time and character and turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family\u2019s catastrophe, even as they are swept up in the invisible currents of history.<\/em><\/p>\n A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heart-gripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see. <\/em>– Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n This title is also available in large print.<\/p>\n When Hazel Blum\u2019s father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere town in Maine. With her mother, Claire, a clothing designer, and her father, Gus, an American Studies professor, Hazel and her eleven-year-old brother, Wolf, slowly acclimate to their new lives and connect with the town\u2019s sprawling community. That is, until a dramatic fallout on the very first day of her senior year tips the fickle balance of idyllic Riverburg and impacts everyone in her family.<\/em><\/p>\n Tracking through the perspectives of each member of the Blum family, this relatable fish-out-of-water story handles big issues with great empathy and humor, capturing the love that unites one unforgettable family and the essence of life in small-town Maine. Emotionally deft, authentic, and compulsively readable, Hazel Says No is a debut novel not to be missed.<\/em> – Hanover Square Press<\/p>\n After an emergency leaves her short on rent, thirty-year-old Freya Arnalds bails on her lackluster life as bartender in Maine and returns to her suburban hometown of Somers, New York, to live in the house she inherited from her estranged parents. Despite attempts to lay low, Freya encounters childhood friends, familial enemies, and old flames\u2014as well as her fifteen-year-old niece, Aubrey, who is secretly living in the derelict home. As they reconnect, Freya and Aubrey lean on each other, working to restore the house and come to terms with the devastating events that pulled them apart years ago.<\/em><\/p>\n Set in the birthplace of the American circus, this deeply moving novel is an exploration of broken families, the weight of the past, and the complicated journey of finding home.<\/em> – Gallery Books<\/p>\n There is a heatwave across Europe, and four siblings have gathered at their family\u2019s lake house to seek answers about their father, a famous artist, who recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his long-awaited masterpiece.<\/em><\/p>\n Now he is dead. And there is no sign of his final painting.<\/em><\/p>\n As the siblings try to piece together what happened, they spend the summer in a state of lawlessness: living under the same roof for the first time in decades, forced to confront the buried wounds they incurred as his children, and waiting for answers. Though they have always been close, the things they learn that summer\u2014about themselves\u2014and their father\u2014will drive them apart before they can truly understand his legacy. Meanwhile, their stepmother\u2019s enigmatic presence looms over the house. Is she the force that will finally destroy the family for good?<\/em><\/p>\n Wonderfully atmospheric, at heart this is a novel about the bonds of siblinghood\u2014what happens when they splinter, and what it might take to reconnect them.<\/em> – The Dial Press<\/p>\n This title is also available in large print.<\/p>\n Every summer, Vivian Levy and Lucy Webster spend a month with their father at his lake house \u2014 separately. Raised in New York City, Vivian is an ambitious sommelier with a secret that could derail her future. Lucy grew up in a tiny Maine town, where she now teaches high school English while watching her marriage unravel. They\u2019ve never met. While Lucy envied her half-sister from afar, their father kept Vivian in the dark.<\/em><\/p>\n When Vivian arrives at the lake to spread his ashes and sell his cabin, she\u2019s shocked to find Lucy there, awaiting his return. In an ideal world, they\u2019d help each other through their grief. Instead, forced to spend the summer together, they fight through a storm of suspicion and hostility to untangle the messy truth about their parents\u2019 pasts. While Lucy is desperate to hold onto the house, Vivian is scrambling after a betrayal. After thirty years apart, is it too late for them to be a family?<\/em><\/p>\n For fans of Carley Fortune and Elin Hilderbrand, this sister story set on a lush lake brims with the undeniable heart, depth, charm, and humor that have endeared Hannah Orenstein to legions of readers.<\/em> – Dutton<\/p>\n Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it\u2019s been just Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While it\u2019s a bit lonely, she sometimes admits, and a less exciting life than what she imagined for herself, it\u2019s mostly okay. Mostly.<\/em><\/p>\n Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she\u2019s his half sister. Reuben\u2014left behind by their dad thirty years ago\u2014has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.<\/em><\/p>\n As Mad and Rube\u2014and eventually the others\u2014share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with every new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad\u2019s previously solitary life on the farm?<\/em> – Ecco<\/p>\n Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously \u2013 the one she was born into, and the one she has made.<\/em><\/p>\n Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family\u2019s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.<\/em><\/p>\n Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents\u2019 bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She\u2019s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.<\/em> – Riverhead Books<\/p>\n Alice Storm hasn\u2019t been welcome at her family\u2019s magnificent private island off the Rhode Island coast in five years\u2014not since she was cast out and built her life beyond the Storm name, influence, and untold billions. But the shocking death of her larger-than-life father changes everything.<\/em><\/p>\n Alice plans to keep her head down, pay her final respects (such as they are), and leave the minute the funeral is over. Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his family a final challenge\u2014an inheritance game designed to upend their world. The rules are clear: spend one week on the island, complete their assigned tasks, and receive the inheritance.<\/em><\/p>\n But a whole week on Storm Island is no easy task for Alice. Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting with chaos: Her older sister\u2019s secret love affair. Her brother\u2019s unyielding arrogance. Her younger sister\u2019s constant analysis of the vibes. Her mother\u2019s cold judgment. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father\u2019s intriguing and too-handsome second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape unscathed.<\/em><\/p>\n A smart and tender story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family, this luscious novel explores past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.<\/em> – Ballantine Books<\/p>\n This title is also available in large print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/a>The Bright Years<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Sarah Damoff<\/p>\n
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Bug Hollow<\/strong><\/em> <\/a>by Michelle Huneven<\/p>\n
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<\/a>The Catch<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Yrsa Daley-Ward<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Dominion<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Addie E. Citchens<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Everybody Says It’s Everything<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Xhenet Aliu<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Favorite Daughter<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Morgan Dick<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Flashlight<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Susan Choi<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Hazel Says No<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Jessica Berger Gross<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Home of the American Circus<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Allie Larkin<\/p>\n
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<\/a>The Homemade God<\/a><\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>by Rachel Joyce<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Maine Characters<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Hannah Orenstein<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Run for the Hills<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Kevin Wilson<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Sleep<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Honor Jones<\/p>\n
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<\/a>These Summer Storms<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Sarah MacLean<\/p>\n