By Nora Roberts
Series Chesapeake Bay Saga
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Returning as a successful artist to the home of the family that adopted him, Seth Quinn is intrigued by independent newcomer Dru Whitcomb Banks, who is hesitant to trust Seth, while dark secrets from the past threaten the entire Quinn family.

By K. J. Dell’Antonia
Recommended By Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian

A more than three-decade feud between two Kansas families implodes when a daughter who left one of the families to marry into the other brings the story of their fried-chicken competition to the attention of a popular reality show.

By Ann Leary
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

A wealthy but unconventional New England family of four stepsiblings struggles to come to terms with their legacy and the myths they have built their lives upon during a lavish family wedding that exposes long-standing resentments and unfortunate truths.

By Ann Packer
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When their troubled youngest sibling returns, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, find their lives disrupted in ways they could have never imagined as they each tell their story that is interwoven with portraits of their family at crucial points in their history.

By Melody Carlson
Recommended By Nancy Lowenstein, Library Page

“Christmas is approaching, and Lena Markham finds herself penniless, friendless, and nearly hopeless … When a secondhand red coat unexpectedly lands her a job as Mrs. Santa at a department store, Lena finally thinks her luck is changing. But can she keep her past a secret (From the Publisher).”

By Elizabeth Acevedo

Two sisters mourn their father’s death after his plane crashes on a flight to the Dominican Republic.

By Jeffrey Archer

This sprawling and intricately plotted multigenerational family saga starts with Harry Clifton, a boy of mysterious parentage but much ambition, working on the docks in Bristol, England in 1919. This semiautobiographical story continues through 100 years of history, into the 21st century, from multiple points of view. The series offers colorful characters, mystery, plenty of questionable decision making, and a contested family fortune.

By Alice Walker

Two African American sisters, one a missionary in Africa and the other a child-wife living in the South, support each other through their correspondence, beginning in the 1920s.

By Lisa Scottoline
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“Rebalancing her life and career after a painful divorce, pediatrician Jill learns that her ex has died from an alleged overdose that her former stepdaughter believes was actually murder…. (From the Publisher).”

By Randy Susan Meyers
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

“Traces the intersections of three women five years after a fateful love affair, including a searching woman who gave up her baby for adoption, an adoptive mom who questions her suitability as a parent and a married woman who views her husband’s affair differently upon learning about the baby (From the Publisher).”

By John Burnham Schwartz

In 1959, Haruko marries the Prince of Japan, becoming the first commoner to enter the mysterious world of Japanese royalty.

By Ann Patchett
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

A five–decade saga tracing the impact of an act of infidelity on the parents and children of two Southern California families traces their shared summers in Virginia and the disillusionment that shapes their lasting bond.

By Jennifer Haigh

Unaware of the long-standing grievances harbored by their divorced parents, three adult siblings embark on a tumultuous summer when the oldest, a successful Manhattan doctor, investigates his sister's chromosomal disorder against his mother's wishes.

By Bunmi Laditan
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

After leaving her career to become a stay-at-home-mom, Ashley Keller tries to improve her parenting skills by joining a boot camp called "Motherhood Better" run by her idol, the head of a Pinterest-perfect mommy blog empire, to hilariously awkward results.

By Jonathan Franzen
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old–fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands–off parenting, do– it–yourself mental health care, and globalized greed.

By Roxana Robinson

“When Julia Lambert, an art professor, settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationships with her father, a repressive neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending into Alzheimer’s. But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia’s son Jack has spiraled into heroin addiction…. Robinson tackles addiction and explores its effects on the bonds of family, dazzling us with her hallmark subtlety and precision in evoking the emotional interiors of her characters (From the Publisher).”

By Joyce Maynard
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

The New York Times bestselling author tells the story of Eleanor and Cam as their marriage is shattered by tragedy and infidelity and how, during the decades that follow, they make surprising discoveries and decisions that bring them together, and tear them apart.

By Karen M. McManus

Invited to their grandmother’s island resort for the summer, three cousins who have never previously met uncover dark family secrets about why their parents were disinherited and what they must do to regain their grandmother’s favor.

By Kevin Kwan
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

Envisioning a quality-time summer vacation in the humble Singapore home of a boy she hopes to marry, Chinese American Rachel Chu is unexpectedly introduced to a rich and scheming clan that viciously competes against other wealthy families and strongly opposes their son's relationship with an American girl.

By Wallace Stegner
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Two young couples, Sid and Charity and Larry and Sally, from different backgrounds – East and West, rich and poor – befriend each other in 1937 Madison, Wisconsin.

By Jonathan Franzen
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

As Christmas 1971 approaches, the Hildebrand family of New Prospect, Illinois deals with increasing points of crisis including a stale marriage, the draft and their son's sexual orientation in the first novel in a new trilogy.

By Mary Lawson
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of two families – the farming Pye family, and zoologist Kate Morrison and her three brothers – are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy.

By Fern Michaels
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

“When he inherits the estate of his estranged brother, Ricky Lam decides to develop the resort his brother had planned to build on an island off the coast of South Carolina, where Ricky finds new love with his former sister-in-law (From the Publisher).”

By Lisa Lutz
Series Spellman Files
Recommended By Ed Goldberg, Head of Reference

“… Licensed P.I. Isabel "Izzy" Spellman has been arrested for the fourth time in two months, and no one from her oddball family of fellow investigators will bail her out. Her sister, Rae, has run over Izzy's "fiancé," Inspector Henry Stone, during a driving lesson. The senior Spellmans have staged a "disappearance," their term for a vacation where no one can reach them. To complicate Izzy's life further, a man with the suspiciously ordinary name of John Brown has moved next door, and she's absolutely positive he's up to no good. In other words, it's life as usual for the zany Spellmans, and who knows what will happen next (School Library Journal).”

By Nancy Thayer
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

As soon as she is named one of the youngest family court judges in Massachusetts, Kelly McCleod is saddled with a make-or-break case that could change her life.

By Abraham Verghese
Recommended By Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk

Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.

By Nora Roberts
Series The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

“American Iona Sheehan searches for her Irish ancestors, the O’Dwyers, to learn more about her powers and break an ancient curse, and she falls head over heels for Boyle McGrath, the owner of a local stable (From the Publisher).”

By Laura Zigman
Recommended By Sue Ann R., Head of Children's Services

“Dating Big Bird is funny and convincing enough to penetrate the cynicism of readers who still associate parenthood with " minivans and portacribs and strollers and enormous shoulder-strapped survival bags stuffed with toys and dolls and stickers and hundreds of little Ziploc Baggies (USA Today).”

By Connie Schultz
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

A first novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Life Happens explores the impact of forfeited dreams, long–kept secrets and evolving gender roles on a small family throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

By Joanna Trollope
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“After her youngest son, and last one to marry, brings home his wife, Rachel, feels her role of family matriarch slipping away and must deal with the loss that comes with it, while maintaining the relationships she holds dear (From the Publisher).”

By Elizabeth Berg
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

“A jewel-like collection of short stories … Berg is skilled at depicting the subtle interplay among women, their friends, spouses and families. This collection focuses on quiet, intensely personal discoveries … Berg's writing is so gentle, her people so real, that even these sad stories generate warmth (Kirkus Reviews).”

By Saralee Rosenberg

In Mindy's yoga-obsessed, thirty-is-the-new-wife neighborhood, every day is a battle between Dunkin' Donuts, her jaws-of-life jeans, and Beth Diamond, the self-absorbed sancti-mommy next door who looks sixteen from the back.

By Jenny Offill

An unflinching portrait of marriage features a heroine simply referred to as “the Wife,” who transitions from an idealistic woman who once exchanged love letters with her husband and who confronts an array of universal difficulties.

By Tim Johnston

When their daughter disappears while out for a morning run during a late-summer vacation in the Rocky Mountains, her parents embark on a harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths where they must answer some difficult questions to find the truth.

By Emmanuelle De Villepin

Three generations of women untangle a complex family story that encompasses the First and Second World Wars, revealing unexpected lessons about marriage and fidelity.

By Brenda Janowitz

After Sylvia Gold discovers that her daughter has invited the very wealthy parents of her boyfriend for Seder, she agonizes over making the right impression, but when old memories and grievances surface, she learns the importance of acceptance.

By Jonathan Lethem

A multigenerational saga focuses on two extraordinary women including tyrannical Communist Rose, who terrorizes her neighborhood with her absolute beliefs; and her brilliant but willful daughter, Miriam, who flees her mother's suffocating influence to embrace the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village.

By Kate Morton

A long-lost letter arriving at its destination fifty years after it was sent lures Edie Burchill to crumbling Milderhurst Castle, home of the three elderly Blythe sisters, where Edie's mother was sent to stay as a teenager during World War II.

By Rebecca Wells

When Siddi inadvertently reveals some revealing things about her Southern childhood in a newspaper interview, her mother, Vivi, virtually disowns her. Vivi’s lifelong friends, the Ya–Ya’s, set in motion a plan to bring the mother and daughter back together using a scrapbook of childhood memories that they ask Vivi to put together.

Became the movie: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

By Laura Dave

Hosting a divorce party on what would have been their thirty-fifth anniversary, amicably separated spouses Gwyn and Thomas Huntington unexpectedly toast their son's engagement to a young woman who inadvertently discovers unsettling secrets about the man she is to marry.

By Susan Wilson
Recommended By Sue Ann R., Head of Children's Services

A wounded war veteran and Rosie, a woman wrongly imprisoned for murdering her husband, bond over training a service dog and vow to get Rosie out of jail.

By Kate Hamer

On Ruby’s 13th birthday, a wish she didn’t even know she had suddenly comes true—the couple who raised her aren’t her parents at all; but her real parents are somewhere out there, and Ruby is determined to find them.

By Susan Jane Gilman
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Leaving behind her family and her suburban home when her world implodes, forty-five-year-old Donna Koczynski sets off on a road trip to rebuild her life.

By Boris Fishman
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

When their adopted eight-year-old son Max suddenly turns feral, Maya Shulman convinces her husband, Alex, to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max's birth parents, which results in unexpected consequences and life-altering changes.

By Jessica Anya Blau
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

Following their mother’s heart attack, three adult children return home and try to sort out their lives, including Anna’s obsession with having sex with strangers, Portia’s unfaithful husband, and Emery’s desire for his own family.

By Anna Jean Mayhew

In 1954, 13-year-old Jubie, traveling with her family and her family's black maid Mary Luther--who has always been there for her, making up for her father's rages and her mother's neglect--encounters racial tension and tragedy.

By Ann Patchett
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A tale set over the course of five decades traces a young man’s rise from poverty to wealth and back again as his prospects center around his family’s lavish Philadelphia estate. By the award–winning author of Commonwealth.

By John Steinbeck

he Trasks and the Hamiltons live and work together in Salinas during the early 20th century.

By Ken Follett
Series Century Trilogy
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

A conclusion to the epic trilogy continues the experiences of five intertwined international families as they confront the social, political and economic turmoil of the second half on the 20th century.

By Christie Hodgen
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

“Mary Murphy searches for identity and purpose as she tells the story of her erratic childhood, her runaway sister, and the histories of people with whom she's crossed paths (From the Publisher).”