Showing titles in Family Life

A triumphant family story and sharply observed exploration of privilege, identity, and love in all its forms, following four estranged siblings whose lives collide in the lead-up to a family wedding, when new clues surface about their long-missing father “Truly a great American novel that does...

March 1995. As Raheim “Pooquie” Rivers juggles his increasingly hectic schedule as a supermodel, he is rocked by the news that one of his idols, NWA founder Eric “Eazy-E” Wright, has AIDS. His complacency shattered, Raheim gets tested for HIV but keeps it a secret from his boyfriend, Mitchell “Little Bit” Crawford. Meanwhile, life goes on: his son struggles in a new school and his high school sweetheart falls in love with a new man, while Mitchell becomes concerned about his moodiness and withdrawal.  

Brendan and Casper have lived most of their lives on a Christmas tree farm in Verona, Indiana, but when Brendan is offered the position of head football coach at Indiana University, he can’t resist. The couple leaves all that they know behind and moves to Bloomington to begin a new chapter of their lives. Brendan is living his dream, but Casper finds something missing. Soon, he fills the void by becoming the big brother of a troubled youth, and a new chapter of Brendan and Casper’s life begins.

LIKE WATER LIKE SEA is an immersive novel of self-discovery, resilience, and the unifying power of love. It follows the life of Nia, a queer, bi/pansexual naturopath in London, as her life unfolds across three pivotal moments, spanning from her 28th year to a life-altering realization at the age of 50.

In the small town of Wharton, Connecticut, lives are beginning to unravel. A husband betrays his wife. A son struggles with addiction. A widow misses her late spouse. At the heart of these interlinking stories is one couple: Freddie and Greg Tyler. They seem to have it all—a comfortable home, a beautiful young daughter, a bond that feels unbreakable. But when Greg is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, the sense of certainty they once knew evaporates. 

It’s the final years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Bríd and her sister, Ina, try to maintain a stable life in a divided country. Pushed by her mother’s fanaticism and a family tragedy, Bríd joins the IRA and makes a devastating choice. Frightened and guilt ridden, she flees, leaving behind Ireland and her family for America. Years later, her guilt and tragic history still buried, Bríd is an overprotective mother raising her sensitive daughter, Bernie, in Southern California.

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.

As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future, beyond the world of normal boys.

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.

Asher Logan is a bartender and a pretty wicked guitar player, when he isn’t wrecking his hands fighting in a cage. With a past he keeps hoping to outrun, Asher’s been on a downward spiral for longer than he can remember. When his sister-in-law leaves Rory, his eight-year-old nephew, in his care, Asher is forced into two things he’s never been good at: sobriety and responsibility. As he struggles to care for Rory, his own life begins to unravel.

An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence, woven across generations and geographies, from Turkey to Lebanon to Western Sydney. This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark. When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn between faith and fear, gossip and gospel, family and friendship, Jamal must find and test the limits of love.

Husbands Thomas and Matt are enjoying a second-chance marriage after coming out, leaving their wives, and finding happiness in a summer cottage on the southern coast of Maine. They’ve kept a tenuous peace with their exes. Thomas toils in the garden. There is an ease to their love. This is the way life should be. But it’s not long before their three children—each nearing adulthood and fleeing personal crises of their own—descend on their fathers’ bliss. The two-bedroom getaway has just enough space for Thomas and Matt’s future. Now they must make room for the past, and all its drama.

An entire family comes of age simultaneously in this funny and poignant novel, narrated by a gay 22-year-old son torn between embracing and rejecting his quirky suburban kin. After abandoning a planned suicide, Joshua Royalton returns to his childhood home to unravel the elaborate tales, theories, and neuroses he developed while growing up, including a fictional history of Chinese restaurants, a mortal fear of crows, an obsession with singer Carly Simon, and his parents' addiction to jigsaw puzzles.

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.

It's September 1939, and suddenly everyone faces an uncertain future, especially the children who are evacuated from the East End of London to faraway Norfolk. Billy and Jeannie Curtis, two waifs who have had to raise themselves, are billeted in the sleepy village of Little Asham, but the evacuation is destined to have a profound effect upon both them and the troubled adults whose lives they change.

Unfreiwillig geoutet und von Reportern durch den Hyde Park gejagt werden – besinnlicher könnte Kronprinz Jasper kaum in die Feiertage starten. Als er auf seiner Flucht einen attraktiven Fremden umrennt, ist dieser zum Glück bereit, dem Thronfolger aus seiner misslichen Lage zu helfen. Widrigen Umständen und einem frechen Hund ist es zu verdanken, dass Jasper und der Fremde, der sich als Cal vorstellt, in dessen schäbigem Apartment landen. Cal ist auf der Suche nach einem Fake-Freund für die Weihnachtstage bei seiner Familie und Jasper will sich dem Medienrummel entziehen.

Für die hypermaskuline Welt der Arbeiterviertel im Glasgow der 90er Jahre ist Mungo zu hübsch und zu sanft. Sein Bruder Hamish, gefürchteter Bandenführer, will ihn zum Mann machen und schleift ihn zu den brutalen Kämpfen zwischen Protestanten und Katholiken – nur wer hart genug ist, kann hier überleben. Dann trifft Mungo auf James und mit ihm kann er sein, wie er ist. Mit ihm lernt er ein Begehren kennen, das geächtet ist, das ihn mit Scham erfüllt, aber auch mit Glück, das er selbst vor seiner Schwester Jodie verleugnen muss, mit der er sonst alles teilt.

Brought to you by Penguin. Cate is a stage designer in her early forties, embroiled in theatre projects and the lives of her unconventional Chicago friends and lovers, when her life is suddenly overturned. Walking into her best friend's kitchen one day, she witnesses an act of violence that...

Home, for Noah York, is Oakland, New Hampshire, the sleepy little town where Noah's mother, Virginia, had a psychotic breakdown and Noah got beaten to a pulp as a teenager. Then there were the good times—and Noah's not sure which ones are more painful to recall. Now thirty-seven and eking out a living as an artist in Providence, Rhode Island, Noah looks much the same—and swears just as colorfully—as he did in high school.

Leisa Yeats has always defined herself by the things that are important to her - a good family, a loving relationship, and a meaningful job working with kids. Life is good. But within a span of a few weeks, all of that changes. She’s always known she was adopted, but newly revealed lies and secrets kept by her parents make her question everything she thought she knew about her beginnings. Her 10-year relationship with her partner, Nan, is unexpectedly on shaky ground when she discovers that Nan, too, has kept a secret from her all these years.