By Laurie Fabiano

A multigenerational saga that opens in an Italian village in the 1900s and then crosses the ocean to New York's Lower East Side to tell the dramatic story of the heroine, Giovanna, and how she triumphs over tragedy.

By Kaye Gibbons
Series Ellen Foster

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

By Kate Kerrigan

After her husband, a soldier for the Irish Republican Army, is injured and can no longer work, Ellie Hogan immigrates to New York City where she, working as a maid for a wealthy socialite, becomes tempted by this glittering new world -- and by a charming suitor who can give her all she ever wanted.

By Barbara Hambly

A touching portrait of Mary Todd, a brilliant but troubled young woman in Kentucky, when she meets Abraham Lincoln in 1839.

By Stewart O’Nan
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

“Newly independent widow Emily Maxwell dreams of visits by grandchildren and mourns changes in her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood before realizing an inner strength to pursue developing opportunities (From the Publisher).”

By Alexander McCall Smith

Presents a modern rendering of Jane Austen's classic that follows the experiences of a college graduate who returns to the side of her health–nut father and interferes in the personal lives of her friends.

By Richard Russo

Milo Roby tries to hold his family together while working at the Empire Grill in the once–successful logging town of Empire Falls, Maine, with his partner, Mrs. Whiting, who is the heir to a faded logging and textile legacy.

By Elizabeth Von Arnim
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

Four English women find their lives changed when they rent San Salvatore, a medieval castle on the Italian Riviera.

By Elizabeth Graver
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Ed Goldberg, Head of Reference
With Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, August 5, 2014. 7:30 PM.

“Returning to Ashuant Point to escape from the chaos of rapidly changing times, Helen Porter and her son Charlie soon discover that the Point has not remained unscathed from events unfolding beyond its borders (From the Publisher).”

By Edith Wharton
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie's vivacious cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. 

By Francesca Melandri

Living in Northern Italy, Eva, a 40-year-old PR professional, searches for the truth about her origins when she is called to Southern Italy by a man named Vito, a retired police officer who, in the 60s, fell in love with her mother, Gerda, a northerner and the sister of a terrorist.

By Anna Quindlen
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Mary Beth Latham is first and foremost a mother, whose three teenaged children come first, before her career as a landscape gardener, or even her life as the wife of a doctor. And so,when one of her sons, Max, becomes depressed, Mary Beth becomes focused on him, and is blindsided by a shocking act of violence.

By Beth Harbison
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

Returning to the beach house where her husband died suddenly years earlier, Willa is overwhelmed by memories and reaches out to her son and friends to reconnect and heal.

By Thrity Umrigar
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, July 24, 2018. 1:30 PM.

An African American lawman struggles to come to terms with the moral fallout of crimes committed by his loved ones when he learns that he was wrongly taken from his biological mother and that his white foster father exploited their family's influences to retain custody.

By Jill Santopolo
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

Helping troubled students navigate personal losses, a university psychologist is forced to reckon with her own painful past when a tragic event compels her to reevaluate her goals, passions and sense of identity.

By Robert Dugoni
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian, Isabel Zinman, Readers' Services Librarian

Born with ocular albinism, small-town eye doctor Sam Hill, who was called “Devil Boy” in his youth, must finally face a past tragedy that caused him to turn his back on his friends, his hometown and the life he’d always known—a journey that makes him realize what truly matters.

By Ken Follett
Series Century Trilogy
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian, John Shea, Library Page

Follows the fates of five interrelated families - American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh - as they move through the dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

By Ann-Marie MacDonald

The story of a jinxed family, a catalog of rape, incest and death. James Piper abuses his daughter, atones by sending her to New York to study singing while he goes to war, she returns pregnant, dies in childbirth when her mother opens her to save her twins. One of the twins dies, mother commits suicide, the second twin contracts polio while being baptized in a creek by an aunt, the aunt is raped by James. A first novel set in Nova Scotia early this century.

By Joyce Carol Oates

Follows the interconnected and secretive lives of parents and their children when they are challenged by circumstances outside their family, in a tale set against a backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century.

By Mario Puzo

The story opens with Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia manipulating papal elections in 1492 to become the new Pope Alexander. Determined to establish a family dynasty, he begins ruthlessly eliminating rivals and marrying his children into alliances with the offspring of noble families of France and Spain.

By Naomi Krupitsky
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Pushing against the boundaries of society’s expectations and fighting to preserve their complex but life–sustaining friendship, Sofia Colicchio and Antonia Russo, who live in the shadow of their fathers’ unspoken community until Antonia’s father disappears, find their loyalty tested on one fateful night.

By Penelope Lively
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

All Alison ever wanted was a blissful childhood for her six children, with summers at the beach and birthday parties on the lawn at their family home. Together with Ingrid, the family au pair, she has worked hard to create a real old-fashioned family life. But beneath its postcard sheen, the picture is clouded by a distant father, Alison's inexplicable emotional outbursts, and long-repressed secrets that no one dares mention.

By Lan Samantha Chang
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

When Big Leo, the owner of Fine Chao restaurant is found dead—presumed murdered—his three sons are reunited and fall under suspicion of the town and police, and must reckon with the legacy of their father’s outsized appetites and own future survival.

By Dani Shapiro

“Rachel Jensen, a woman with New York sensibilities and artistic sensitivity, finds her life in complete turmoil after an unfortunate family incident spirals out of control, leaving her separated from her husband of 15 years and with her teenage daughter in an exclusive reform school. Rachel's past unfolds as she tries to make sense of what has happened and of her growing dysfunction… Shapiro effectively depicts the emotional chaos of a family in pain and the loneliness that results when people are separated from loved ones (Library Journal).”

By Akhil Sharma
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
With Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, January 19, 2016. 1:30 PM.

Finally joining their father in America, Ajay and Birju enjoy their new, extraordinary life until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother incapacitated and the other practically orphaned.

By Elinor Lipman
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

"A hysterical phone call from his ex-wife and a familiar face in a photograph upend Henry Archer’s well ordered life. They bring him back into contact with the child he adored, a short-term stepdaughter from a misbegotten marriage long ago…(From the Publisher)."

By Allegra Goodman

Told through weddings, deaths, academic conferences, and dreams, the uniquely humorous story of three generations of Markowitzes is revealed, creating a familial world of conflict, confusion, and love.

By Rohinton Mistry
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions

“Mistry presents a magnetic tale of family obligations that comes as close to perfect as a novel can get. The setting is the ever-hectic city of Bombay during a 1990s wave of violent religious extremism, and the focus is on an extended Parsi family suffering the long-term consequences of a Juliet and Romeo-like tragedy (From the Publisher).”

By Jane Green

As dark truths from the past reveal themselves, two middle-aged women must learn to forgive -- for the sake of their children and themselves.

By Nancy Thayer
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

Newly widowed, Eleanor Sunderland finds dreams of a family reunion in Nantucket shattered when her money-driven children suggest she sell the house and move to a retirement home, and finds a lone ally in her 22-year-old granddaughter, Ari, who moves in with her for the summer.”

By Barbara Delinsky

Elizabeth Clarke, a beautiful daughter born to Hugh and Dana, possesses definite African American traits, leaving the parents puzzled and the extended Clarke family scandalized.

By Kristin Hannah
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

An exploration of the complicated terrain between best friends - one who chooses marriage and motherhood while the other opts for career and celebrity. 

By Emily Giffin
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

While Meredith becomes increasingly unsure about the strength of her bond with her seemingly perfect husband and daughter, her once–happily single sister, Josie, frantically dates and considers her options in her desperation to have a baby.

By Joanne Harris

Returning to the small Loire village of her childhood to run a cafe, Franboise Dartigen soon finds that hidden among her mother's recipes are clues that will lead her to the truth of long ago.

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Divorcing his hostile wife when he concludes he could find genuine happiness elsewhere, a doctor is astonished when his ex abruptly disappears, making him unable to move on without acknowledging painful truths about his marriage.

By Lynn Steger Strong

A group of siblings and their spouses gather for Christmas in upstate New York to try decide through rising tensions and old hurts what to do with the house their recently deceased mother has left them.

By Rachel Beanland
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

Renting out their 1934 Atlantic City home and crowding into the apartment above their bakery with their daughters and a mysterious emigrée, a family constructs an elaborate web of lies to cover up a devastating tragedy.

By Jennifer Weiner
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

A politician's wife retreats with her grown daughters to a Connecticut beach house.

By John Grisham

In his first collection of short stories John Grisham takes us back to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his first novel, A Time to Kill.

By Catherine Chung
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, November 27.  1:30 PM.

Learning on the night of her sister's birth that a daughter has been lost in every generation of her Korean family, Janie assumes a protective role over her sister while learning more cautionary stories from her optimistic father and mythology-minded mother until her sister's abrupt defection years later reveals painful family secrets.

By Kate Morton
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Abandoned on a 1913 voyage to Australia, Nell is raised by a dock master and his wife who do not tell her until she is an adult that she is not their child, leading Nell to return to England and eventually hand down her quest for answers to her granddaughter.

By Karen White

Dr. Kate Schuyler finds herself drawn into a mystery involving three generations of her family when Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought into the private Manhattan hospital where she works.

By John Galsworthy

This begins the famous saga of a British upper-middle class family, the family patriarch Soames, artist Jolyon, the alluring Irene and others.

By R. C. Sherriff
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

This wonderfully nostalgic and soothing novel about ordinary people enjoying life's simple pleasures follows the Stevens family as they go on their annual seaside vacation during which they savor every moment of their holiday, knowing that things may not be the same next year.

By Lisa Unger
Series Hollows
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

“When her rebellious teenage son's girlfriend goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Maggie becomes increasingly fearful about unsettling ties between the investigation and an unsolved missing-person case from twenty years earlier … (From the Publisher).”

By Jonathan Franzen

The idyllic lives of civic–minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go–getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.

By Anne Tyler
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian, Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

Follows the Garrett family from 1959 onward as they discover that their actions advance across decades and ripple through generations, in the new novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Breathing Lessons.

By Kate Jacobs
Series Friday Night Knitting Club

Gathering for their weekly knitting club at a small yarn shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a group of friends shares such challenges as raising children, navigating the ups and downs of their careers, and pursuing uncertain relationships.

By Susan Mallery
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

Reuniting in the aftermath of a devastating loss, two single moms, lifelong best friends, create a list of challenges, from skydiving to getting tattoos, before their prospects and perspectives are transformed by unexpected love.

By Dorothea Benton Frank
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

"At thirty-one and still, shockingly, unmarried, Grace has scandalized her staunchly traditional Italian family by moving in with her boyfriend Michael - who, though a truly great guy, is agnostic, commitment-phobic, a scientist, and (horror of horrors) Irish! (From the Publisher)."