Family life fiction Books

"On Second Base" asks the question, "Have you ever regretted the past choices you've made?" Rev. Paul Lombard has regrets in spades as he retreats to sit on second base at the ball field, thinking about the life he might be living had he chosen baseball...

Ivan and Phoebe otherwise known as the Revolution on Granite or the First Maidan and investigates the difficulties and absurdities of a society swiftly shifting from subjugation to revolution to post-Soviet rule.Married couple Ivan and Phoebe grapple...

Anne Garrta has come into the English-speaking world with high acclaim. Her book Sphinx (also translated by Emma Ramadan) is our best seller ever. She has big fans among LGBTQ+ readers, translation fans (of course), fans of experimental writing...

"...a dazzling portrait of a man who lives up to his name, and of those who love him. A wonderful novel." -Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in The FieldMirth chronicles the struggles of a writer, Harrison Mirth, a romantic man who writes about love and...

Down to the River is a family saga set in the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Twin brothers, Nash and Remi Potts, have grown up as entitled, Harvard-educated, golden boys, heirs to an old, but dwindling...

Following the shocking death of a teenage boy, Barrett and Amelia are moved to revisit the passing of their own daughter, Edi, which occurred in the same small town nearly a decade earlier. Amelia finds herself caring for the recently deceased boy's...

A novel about a marriage torn apart by a violent secret for fans of Lauren Groff's Fates and FuriesEmilia has it all: a rewarding career as a statistician, a wonderful husband, two healthy young sons, and a house in the countryside. But when a...

By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner.Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly...

By the author of the international bestseller Evening Is The Whole Day, this novel set in Malaysia will appeal to readers of Arundhati Roy and Kiran DesaiIn what was once a Scottish tea planter's mansion in the highlands of Peninsular Malaysia, all...

A young mother follows her partner to a rural community in West Jutland, Denmark, where he teaches at the local school for adult education. Isolated, she is forced to find her way in a bewildering community and in the inscrutable conversational forms of...

Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqi go way back. Both hailing from dysfunctional families, they grew up together in a Chinese provincial capital in the 1980s. Now, many years later, the childhood friends reunite and discover how much they still have in common. Both...

For fans of Marriage Story and Elena Ferrante's Days of AbandonmentTerri runs off with a lover, abandoning her children and her marriage of twenty-five years. Her husband, David, is left to take care of their two daughters, one of whom is...

2022 PEN Translation Award FINALISTIn this masterful novel, author Juli Zeh skillfully shifts away from the conventional tale of a middle-aged, middle-class father out for a New Year's Day bike ride to an unexpectedly dark, psychological family drama...

Babakar is an African doctor living alone until the child Anas comes into his life. Forced to abandon his solitude, he takes her to Haiti in search of her family.Babakar is a doctor living alone, with only the memories of his childhood in Mali. In his...

A thirty-five-year-old writer decides she wants to have children. Rounds of IVF treatments and several years later, she has two daughters and sits down to write this book. World's Best Mother is a sublime journey - through pregnancy, the mothering of...

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2021In this honest, tender account of brotherly love, thirteen-year-old Brian is tasked with caring for his disabled older brotherThirteen-year-old Brian lives in a trailer on a forgotten patch of land with...

This international bestseller by French author Adeline Dieudonne is one girl's bitingly funny coming-of-age tale within a violent, savage family.At home there are four bedrooms: one for her, one for her little brother Sam, one for her parents, and one...

A family on the brink of disaster...Ellen's stopped talking. She thinks she may have killed her dad. Her brother's barricaded himself in his room. Their mother, a successful actress, carries on as normal. We're a family of light! she insists. But...

Beautiful, happy people? No. Outcasts, bullies, a bizarre murder, drama, mystery, a child's heartache? Yes.Lucy is the most popular girl in the local elementary school of an idyllic Dutch housing estate. When a bizarre crime rocks her world and sends her...

Flanders, 1915.David Verbocht, sentenced to death as a deserter, stands before thefiring squad and looks back on his short life. As a young man, David was sent awayby his parents, after a tragic accident in the family, to become a school teacher in...

Inventive, dreamy Gieles lives with his father and a flock of geese on a plane-spotters' campsite next to an airstrip. The surrounding landscape reclaimed from the sea, is as isolated as Gieles himself. The fourteen-year-old boy is longing for the...

"We and Me is a novel that will haunt me for a long time. Excellent and unforgettable." Herman Koch, author of The DinnerIn this spellbinding novel, which has been compared to the work of Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers and Jeffrey Eugenides, Saskia de...

Elisabeth is dying. Coco jumps at this chance to prove her love, and promptly moves in with her deteriorating mother. A venture that quickly sends both parties spiraling out of control. Alongside a supporting cast of ex-bosses, ex-husbands, and (soon to...

'You Have Me to Love is an intense and dramatic novel filled with meticulous use of detail and a forensic psychological accuracy. Its power comes from the fierce energy of the narrative structure, the way of handling silence and pain, and the ability to...

John Proctor, about to turn seventy, spies a disconsolate young man eyeing him from outside his remote studio window. Invited inside from the bitter cold and fed dinner, the visitor, who calls himself Eli, implies that he is no stranger to the man,...

The Rumpus Book Club Pick, May 2022Most Anticipated Books of 2022, The Rumpus16 Upcoming Books from Indie Presses You'll Love, BuzzFeedBest Books of the Summer, Powell's Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the...

Over a five-year period, Martha Johnson murders her four children, one by one, in order to punish her husband when they argue, but Martha is no ordinary serial killer. She murders her children by using the bulk of her 250-pound body to suffocate them...

When his father leaves town, twelve-year-old Rodney Culver's mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner--and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man's influence at first, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time...

Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: India's holy city on the banks of the Ganges has many names but holds one ultimate promise for Hindus. It is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. As...

From the author of Nightwood, Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad.Told as through a kaleidoscope, the chronicle of the Ryder family is a bawdy tale of...

It's 1942. The Japanese have invaded Burma and are closing in on India. After five years in the remote Andaman Islands, aspiring anthropologist Claire Durant and her husband Shep, a civil surgeon, must evacuate with their beloved but mysteriously mute...

This harrowing and extraordinary story, based on a true event, is part of a series of tales illuminating the microcosm of all humanity contained in a typical Chinese "worker village." Here, an exploited young factory worker has nothing to live for beyond...

Kalina, born in Bulgaria and now living in Boston, has always been a spiritual seeker. Her fourteen-year-old son, Marko, who has spina bifida and is partially paralyzed, shares her curiosity about larger metaphysical questions, but also has his own...

Sinking Islands continues the story of Bronwyn Artair, a scientist who possesses the power to influence the natural forces of the Earth. After several successful interventions, including one in Siberia, she has gone into hiding, worried about unintended...

Jane is a Los Angeles nurse who grew up in a Christian cult that puts celebrities on trial for their sins. Daniel is a has-been actor whose career ended when the cult family members nearly killed him for flirting with her. Eight years after a romantic...

*SILVER MEDALIST in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for Best Popular Fiction - English* Happily married, backed by a powerful mentor, and with career prospects that would take him abroad, Serguey has more than any young Cuban lawyer could ask...

The tragic tale of a Montana family ripped apart by scandal and murder: "a significant and elegant addition to the fiction of the American West" (Washington Post).In the summer of 1948, twelve-year-old David Hayden witnessed and experienced a series of...

Over the course of one fateful day, Trisha Donahue begins to reclaim her courage and discovers secrets in a familiar place. A surprising, quietly dramatic adventure story infused with Ellen Cooney's warm humor and wisdom.After years of skilled work and...

DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he's called back to his cramped Southern hometown for his uncle's funeral, he s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly...

Emily Dickinson is as famous for being a recluse as she is for her poetry. In this stunning novel, we see her struggling to reconcile spirit and flesh, preferring letters and reflecting that the only way to have books and life is to live through one's...

Set in the British Columbia Interior, the novel Cambium Blue is an homage to resource towns, independent women and local newspapers.In 1994, at the outset of the bark beetle epidemic that will decimate millions of acres of pine forest in western North...

A writer and former ski jumper facing a terminal diagnosis takes one more leap-into a past of soaring flights and broken family bondsA brilliant ski jumper has to be fearless-Jon Bargaard remembers this well. His memories of daring leaps and risks might...

The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories (1917) is a collection of nine stories by Russian writer Anton Chekhov. Recognized today as foundational for the development of the modern short story, Anton Chekhov has transcended Russian literature to become one...

White Resin is an ethereal love story of the almost-impossible reconciliation between the manufactured world and the haunting and feminine nature that envelops it. In this impassioned and wildly imagined story of creation, a girl named Da, is born to...

From the acclaimed author of the internationally bestselling Ava Lee novels, a bold and captivating new novel about a search for lost family and the cost of keeping secrets.As a boy, Jack Anderson was abandoned by his mother in a Glasgow movie theatre...

L'Heureux is a writer of astonishing vision-a master of storytelling and the sentence.A nun crashes her car; an unborn child sings to its mother; a troubled priest is in the market for a London apartment. In The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast, John L'Heureux...

In the universally-praised Returning to Earth, Jim Harrison has delivered a masterpiece-a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and the possibility of finding redemption in unlikely places. Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish...

Chosen by the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Novels of 2005, Lily King's new novel is a story about an independent woman and her fifteen-year-old son, and the truth she has long concealed from him. Fifteen years ago Vida Avery...