By Jennifer Chiaverini
Series Elm Creek Quilts

A tale of adventure, love, perseverance and quilting involving a run-away slave.

By Amy Franklin-Willis
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

"After losing her twin to a drowning accident and his wife to divorce, Zeke Cooper leaves his mother and two daughters behind in Tennessee and travels to Virginia horse country, where he considers his responsibility to repair his fractured family (From the Publisher)."

By Alyson Richman
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, January 24, 2012.  1PM & 7:30 PM.

“From the glamorous ease of life in Prague before the Occupation, to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the power of first love, the resilience of the human spirit- and the strength of memory (From the Publisher).”

By Christina Pishiris
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Zoë Frixos gets the whole love song thing. Truly, she does. As an editor at a major music magazine in London, it's part of her job description. But love? Let's just say Zoë's been a bit off-beat in that department. After falling hard for her best friend, Simon, at thirteen and missing every chance to tell him how she felt before he left town, Zoë came to one grand conclusion: Love stinks.

Twenty years later, Simon is returning to London, newly single and as charming as ever, and Zoë vows to take her second chance. But Zoë's got other problems now: In order to save her magazine from closure, she has to land the biggest interview of her career with a notoriously elusive rock idol. There's just one problem: Nick, the arrogant publicist who seems determined to stop the story and ruin Zoë's life.

With her brother's big(ish) fat(ish) Greek wedding on the horizon, Zoë begins to wonder if her first love is the right love. In the wake of a life-changing choice, Zoë must decide if she's right to be skeptical about love, or if it's time to change her tune..

By Jhumpa Lahiri
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, May 27, 2014. 1:30 PM.

Frequently mistaken for one another in spite of very different natures, brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue respective lives in rebellion-torn 1960s Calcutta until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.

By Adriana Trigiani
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

The daughter of an Italian immigrant family in 1950 Greenwich Village, Lucia Sartori pursues a career in the fashion industry until she falls in love with a handsome stranger, who must win over her traditional family to marry her.

By Amy Bloom
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

Forging a life together after being abandoned by their parents, half-sisters Eva and Iris share decades in and out of the spotlight in golden-era Hollywood and mid-20th-century Long Island.

By Jodi Picoult

Her life upended when her husband revealed a darker side, Olivia MacAfee and her teenage son Asher move back to her New Hampshire hometown for a new beginning until Asher is implicated in the death of his girlfriend and she realizes he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.

By J. Courtney Sullivan
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“Three generations of women converge on the family beach house in this wickedly funny, emotionally resonant story of love and dysfunction (From the Publisher).”

By Helen Simonson
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian, Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian

Tuesday, October 25, 2011.  1 PM & 7:30 PM.

“The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more …(From the Publisher).”

By Jennine Capo Crucet

Upsetting her family by attending an elite college far from home, Cuban-American Lizet struggles with identity issues and her father’s abandonment before meeting a young boy whose mother’s death enmeshes Lizet’s family in Florida’s heated immigration debates.

By Sloan Wilson

After returning from World War II, Tom Rath takes a PR job at a television network. But when a series of personal crises force him to reexamine his priorities and take responsibility for his past he is finally moved to carve out an identity for himself.

By Tessa Hadley

Collects stories featuring dramas, generational sagas, love affairs, and life-altering realizations from a girl who insists on marrying her professor to a producer’s wife who gets to lead a different life after her husband’s death.

By Dorothy Koomson
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“Searching for the simple life and a fresh start, Kendra Tamale rents a room from Kyle Gadsborough, only to become drawn into the lives of her new landlord's household… (From the Publisher).”

By Louise Erdrich

Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action.  With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher’s precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America.  In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family - which includes Eva and four sons - and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town.  When the Old World meets the New - in the person of Delphine Watzka - the great adventure of Fidelis’s life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted.  She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles.  These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine’s life, and the trajectory of this brilliant novel. -Book Jacket

By Joshua Henkin

In 1987, an encounter between Julian Wainwright, the scion of a New York City old money family and an aspiring writer, and Mia Mendelsohn, a beautiful Jewish girl, ignites a love affair, spurred on by family tragedy, that spans twenty years.

By A.M. Homes
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

Feeling overshadowed by his more-successful younger brother, Harold is shocked by his brother's violent act that irrevocably changes their lives, placing Harold in the role of father figure to his brother's adolescent children and caregiver to his aging parents.

By Jude Deveraux
Recommended By Rosanne Crudo, Head of Circulation

The award-winning author of A Knight in Shining Armor presents a latest historical family saga chronicling the lives and loves of three generations of women in a small Kansas community.

By Kim Edwards
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter’s affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.

Became the movie: The Memory Keeper's Daughter.

By Joanna Trollope
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

Both happy in their relationships with younger women, James Mallow, a teacher, and his friend, Hugh Hunter, a television personality, find the age difference becoming a problem when an older woman sows a seed of discontent in the young women.

By George Eliot
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

“In nineteenth-century England, Dorthea Brooke’s wishes to defy social conventions are inhibited by the strict nature of her surroundings (From the Publisher).”

By Jeffrey Eugenides
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41–year–old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this mesmerizing saga of a near–mythic Greek American family.

By Jami Attenberg
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

"Two siblings with very different personalities attempt to take control of their mother’s food obsession and massive weight gain to save her life after their father walks out and leaves her reeling in the Chicago suburbs (From the Publisher)."

By Judy Fong Bates

Su-Jen Chou, a Chinese immigrant growing up in 1950s Ontario, finds herself shouldering the weight of her mother's hopes and dreams as her isolated family attempts to forge a life for themselves in a small town.

By Adriana Trigiani
Series Big Stone Gap Novels
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

“Ave Maria faces unexpected tests of her faith, conscience, and understanding as her daughter, Etta, confronts adulthood, her friends in Big Stone Gap deal with major life changes of their own, and her husband sets out to reinvent his life (From the Publisher).”

By George Eliot
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

St. Ogg, a small town, is the main setting for the difficult relations of a brother and sister, once closely tied, and an unworthy lover.

Became the movie: The Mill on the Floss

By Emma Straub
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Three friends and former college bandmates struggle with the midlife difficulties of managing the sexuality, independence, and secrets of their young adult children against painful memories of a friend who soared and fell without them.

By Alan Brennert
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

Tracks the poignant struggle of a Hawaiian woman who contracts leprosy as a child in Honolulu during the 1890s and is deported to the island of Moloka'i, where she grows to adulthood at the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa.

By Sue Miller

Derailed by the sudden passing of her husband of thirty years, an artist on the brink of a gallery opening struggles to pick up the pieces of her life before discovering harrowing evidence of her husband's affair.

By Lauren Groff
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian, Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Returning in disgrace to her mother’s home after an affair with her professor, temperamental Willie arrives at the same time the remains of a prehistoric creature are discovered in the town’s lake, a finding that leads to painful revelations about Willie’s family.

By Michael Chabon
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

A man bears witness to his grandfather’s deathbed confessions, which reveal his family’s long-buried history and his involvement in a mail-order novelty company, World War II, and the space program.

By Joshua Henkin
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

When the health of her husband, a brilliant Shakespeare professor, starts declining, Pru, struggling on her own and feeling isolated, meets a man with whom the possibility of new romance blooms until her estranged stepson, a wealthy biotech investor, come back into their lives.

By Leah Franqui

An independent New York foodie accompanies her husband to his home in Mumbai, where her ex–pat sense of adventure is tested by the unexpected arrival of her headstrong mother–in–law.

By Koren Zailckas

The disturbing fate of a runaway older sister is gradually revealed in a tale told from the perspectives of the Hurst family, including a teen girl whose drug use has landed her in a mental ward, an autistic youth, an alcoholic father, and an insidiously manipulative mother.

By Bonnie Jo Campbell

A collection of stories featuring the working-class struggles and self-sabotaging betrayals of mother and daughter protagonists includes “My Dog Roscoe,” “Blood Work, 1999,” and “My Bliss.”

By Saira Shah

A moving and thought-provoking story about how the best parts of life are often the most complicated.

By Evan Connell
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

With a surgeon’s skill, Connell cuts away the middle-class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development underneath. The entropy of time and relationships lead Mrs. Bridge's three children and husband to recede into a remote silence, and she herself drifts further into doubt and confusion. The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen, to deflect any possible spark of conversation. The novel is comprised of vignettes, images, fragments of conversations, and events, all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal isolation.

By Virginia Woolf
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

During one day of arranging for her party Mrs. Dalloway remembers her youth, considers the crushing effects of the Great War, and reexamines her marriage.

By Jennifer Weiner
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

Tuesday, February 25, 2020. 1 PM.

Two sisters struggle to find their place, be true to themselves and adapt to rapid changes happening throughout the latter half of 20th–century America.

By Tom Perrotta
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

After her only child leaves for college, Eve struggles to adjust to her empty nest until she receives a message from a secret admirer and becomes obsessed with a fantasy porn site for women.

By Elizabeth Taylor
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

A blackly humorous story of loneliness, deception, and life in old age by one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth century.

By Emma Robinson
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions

When her husband’s ex-girlfriend arrives with his 4-year-old daughter Cara in hand, desperately needing him to take Cara in, Rebecca, shocked at this news, wonders if she has it in her to welcome her husband’s child into her heart and home.

By Elizabeth Strout
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

After an appendix operation puts her in the hospital, New York writer Lucy Barton reconnects with her estranged mother as the pair reminisce about the past.

By Jodi Picoult
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

Conceived to provide bone marrow for her sister, teenaged Anna decides to fight for the rights to her own body.

By M.O. Walsh

A man reflects on the summer of his fourteenth year, where in Baton Rouge he fell in love with a golden-haired girl across the street before an unspeakable crime shattered illusions in his seemingly idyllic neighborhood.

By Jhumpa Lahiri
Recommended By Lakshmi Kasturi, Library Clerk

“A portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.”

Became the movie: The Namesake.

By Nancy Thayer
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

The long-awaited nuptials of a woman to the love of her life are thrown into turmoil and drama by family dynamics involving her daughters, including one whose husband has just revealed an affair and another who falls for her soon-to-be stepbrother.

By Diane Chamberlain
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Caring for her family on their mid-twentieth-century tobacco farm after the loss of her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy connects with Grace County social worker Jane Forrester, who strains her personal and professional relationships with her advocacy of Ivy's family.

By Kamala Markandaya
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions

“This critically acclaimed novel tells the story of India and its people through the eyes of one woman and her experiences in one peasant family in a primitive Indian village (From the Publisher).”

By Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

Gathering to confront their older brother, who has recently been released from rehab after a drunk driving accident, the Plumb siblings watch as the trust fund left by their father rises and falls according to self-inflicted problems.