By Tayari Jones
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian
With Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, May 14, 2019. 7:30 PM.

When her new husband is arrested and imprisoned for a crime she knows he did not commit, a rising artist takes comfort in a longtime friendship only to encounter unexpected challenges in resuming her life when her husband's sentence is suddenly overturned.

By Amanda Hodgkinson

“Leaving Poland for England at the end of World War II, Silvana is accompanied by eight-year-old, near-feral Aurek, with whom she shares traumatic wartime memories that set them apart from her husband, who has remade himself as an Englishman to forget the past (From the Publisher).”

By Paul Auster
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

A single child born in 1947 experiences four parallel lifetimes poignantly marked by shifting family fortunes, athletic pursuits, friendships, sex, intellectual passions, and the same intriguing woman.

By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

“Admission is at once a fascinating look at the complex college admissions process and an emotional examination of what happens when the secrets of the past return and shake a woman's life to its core (From the Publisher).”

Became the movie: Admission.

By Ann-Marie MacDonald

A stay-at-home mom, juggling the inherent insanity of caring for small children, experiences a flare-up of a childhood illness that causes her to question her own upbringing and the way she is raising her family.

By Alison Espach
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

“In Espach's charming coming-of-age debut, 14-year-old Emily Vidal's life begins to veer off course at her father's 50th birthday party when he announces that he and her mother are divorcing… (From Publishers Weekly).”

By Caroline Hulse
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

After splitting up, a couple each bring their new significant other to Happy Forest Holiday Park in an attempt to give their daughter a "normal" family Christmas which turns into a powder keg fueled by drinking too much and oversharing.

By Clare Mackintosh
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Disagreeing for the first time when their son falls ill and they receive conflicting doctor recommendations, a devoted couple finds a unique way for both of their preferences to become possible.

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

A matriarch confronts the legacy of her parenting mistakes while her adult children navigate respective challenges in high standards and immaturity, before a teen granddaughter makes a courageous decision to tell the truth.

By Jami Attenberg
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Hiding the truth about her unhappiness and struggles with anxiety from everyone including her family, best friend and therapist, an alcoholic designer joins her loved ones in a reevaluation of family strength in the wake of a newborn’s heartbreaking ailment.

By Judith Frank
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When Daniel Rosen's twin brother and sister-in-law are killed in a bombing in Jerusalem, he and his husband Matthew are confronted with challenges that threaten their relationship as they try to adopt the couple's two children.

By Wallace Stegner
With Lisa Caputo, Assistant Library Director

Tuesday, May 24, 2011. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.

Retirees Joseph and Ruth Allston find their placid, rural California life disrupted by a hippie who builds a treehouse on their property and by a young married couple tragically affected by pregnancy and cancer.

By Caroline Angell

A young composer takes a job as a nanny caring for two young boys, but after a tragedy strikes the family, she realizes the children need her to face their loss and she must make a choice between her career and her love for them.

By Fannie Flagg
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

“A novel spanning decades, generations and America in the 1940s and today, centers around five women who worked in a Phillips 66 gas station during the WWII years (From the Publisher).”

By Susan Isaacs
Series Legendary Lovers

This story of Jane and Nicholas Cobleigh, takes a look at the comedy and heartbreak of twenty years of marriage.

By Joshilyn Jackson
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Leia discovers she is pregnant with a biracial child but before she can tell her conventional Southern family, her grandmother slips into dementia and Leia discovers that the elderly woman has been hiding a secret linked to the Civil War.

By Kristan Higgins
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When John Frost has a stroke, his family, including his two daughters — perfect Julie and free-spirited Sadie, and his wife of 50 years, are forced to confront the truth about their lives, in this new novel about what family really means.

By Anne Tyler

Marrying quickly during World War II after falling in love at first sight, a mismatched couple discovers that their very different personalities and approaches to life are taking a toll on their lives, their relationship, and their family, in a compelling novel spanning three generations. Genres: Domestic Fiction; Family Saga; Historical Fiction; Modern Era

By Curtis Sittenfeld
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

When her husband is elected president of the United States, Alice Blackwell finds her new life as first lady increasingly tumultuous as she recalls her early life, her courtship and marriage, and the crisis that nearly destroyed their relationship and reflects on the privileges and difficulties of her position as her private beliefs conflict with her public responsibilities.

By Julia Pierpont
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A former ballet dancer struggles to protect her children before receiving an anonymous package revealing her weak artist husband’s infidelities, a discovery that leads to a difficult breakup during a New York summer.

By Lena Mahmoud
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions

After her mother is killed and her father disappears, Isra Shadi, whose parents were Palestinian and white, lives with her aunt and uncle, but when she is encouraged to leave and marry, she chooses a love from her past, as she is caught between two cultures and struggles for identity.

By Khaled Hosseini

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations.

By Jeffrey Archer
Recommended By Arlene Silverman, Library Clerk

“…Some of these stories will make you laugh while others will bring you to tears but, once again, every one of them will demand that you keep turning the page until you finally discover what happens to this remarkable cast of characters (From the Publisher).”

By Wallace Stegner

“This long, thoughtful novel about a retired historian who researches and writes about his pioneer grandparents garnered Stegner a Pulitzer Prize (Publishers Weekly).”

By Lorna Landvik

Five friends share three decades of marriages, child raising, neighborhood parties and bad husbands.

By DeuxMoi with Jessica Goodman

A debut novel by the anonymous creator of “the Internet’s best gossip” Instagram account takes readers behind the scenes in a novel that recounts her accidental rise to becoming the queen of blind–items.

By Jane Green
Recommended By Ann Competello, Library Clerk, Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“Marrying a divorced father of two, Andi finds herself struggling to gain her stepdaughters' acceptance while preserving family peace in the face of daily dramas and competitions for her husband's attention (From the Publisher).”

By Hilary Thayer Hamann
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

"Hamann's debut traces the sensual, passionate, and lonely interior of a young woman artist growing up in windswept East Hampton at the end of the 1970’s (From the Publisher)."

By Eleanor Brown
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Three sets of parents become intertwined after adopting four biological siblings and making a commitment to keep the children connected.

By Susan Isaacs

Growing up under the care of her financially disadvantaged grandmother, Amy Lincoln wins prestigious scholarships and launches a journalism career before meeting a student who claims to be the illegitimate son of a presidential candidate.

By Elizabeth Strout
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

Two sisters, one who trades self–respect for a wealthy husband and one who discovers a kindred spirit in the pages of a book, struggle with intimate human dramas at the sides of their community members and a returned Lucy Barton.

By Lauren Groff
Recommended By Isabel Zinman, Readers' Services Librarian

“In a haunting story of the American dream, Bit, born in a back-to-nature commune in 1970s New York State, must come to grips with the outside world when the commune eventually fails (From the Publisher).”

By Sarah Dunn
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A progressive New York couple with an autistic son move to a bucolic Hudson Valley exurb and immerse themselves in the local community only to have their bond tested by an invitation to become and open-marriage couple.

By Camille Noe Pagán
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“Marissa Rogers is forced to reevaluate her choices when her once-domineering best friend loses her memory in an accident, causing Marissa to confront painful shared memories (From the Publisher).”

By Jan-Philipp Sendker
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, April 28, 2015. 1:30 PM.

"When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter has any idea where he might be—until they find a love letter he wrote many years before, to a Burmese woman who is unknown to them (From the Publisher)."

By Garth Stein
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian
With Ed Goldberg, Head of Reference, Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian, Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian, Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

“He Said, She Said” Book Discussion
Join us for a special evening to celebrate a year of great books and discussions.

Monday, December 19, 2011. 7:30 PM.

Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher’s soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe’s maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.

By Susan Meissner
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

A tale set in 1918 Philadelphia during the Spanish flu epidemic traces the experiences of a family reeling from the losses of loved ones and changes in their adopted city, a situation that is further shaped by their decision to take in an orphaned infant.

By Lauren Willig

Feeling unfulfilled in the face of an imminent legal partnership and a broken engagement, Manhattan lawyer Clementine Evans learns of a long-buried family secret that leads her to the inner circles of World War I British society and the red hills of Kenya.

By Mary Beth Keane
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

When a violent event forcibly ends their romance, the son and daughter of two NYPD rookies reconnect years later and struggle to prevent the past from triggering another separation.

By Maggie Shipstead
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

Helping a world-famous dancer to defect from the Soviet Union to the United States, ballerina Joan watches her friend’s career soar while her own declines in the wake of her pregnancy and marriage, a situation that eventually exposes difficult secrets.

By Emily X. R Pan
With Meghan Fangmann, Librarian, Pam Strudler, Librarian

Tuesday, August 6, 2019. 7:30 PM.

A teen grieving the loss of her mother travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time and search for her mother's spirit while uncovering tragic family secrets and struggling to reconcile the truth about how her mother's life really ended.

By Kate Christensen

Kicked out of the crumbling Brooklyn home that he thought was a happy one, poet Harry Quirk struggles to make sense of his literary, marital, financial and parental failures while trying to get back into his estranged wife's good graces.

By Tracy Chevalier

Settling in the swamps of early 19th-century northwest Ohio, the Goodenough family works relentlessly to establish an apple orchard that reflects respective dreams before their youngest child heads to Gold Rush California to collect seeds for a naturalist.

By Brenda Janowitz

In a novel inspired by Audrey Hepburn's classic film Sabrina, a caterer returns to the grand Long Island estate – – now set for demolition – – where she grew up as the daughter of the house manager, and where a rekindled love triangle reveals bittersweet truths about her upbringing and a shattering secret about her family.

By Melanie Benjamin
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian
With Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, November 26, 2013. 1:30 PM.

A story inspired by the marriage between Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh traces the romance between a handsome young aviator and a shy ambassador's daughter whose relationship is marked by wild international acclaim.

By Jennifer Haigh

This novel depicts life in postwar Pennsylvania through the struggles of one widow trying to raise five children.

By Parini Shroff

Considered a “self-made” widow after the disappearance of her husband, Geeta, when other women in the village ask her for help in getting rid of their own no–good husbands, must decide how far she is willing to go to protect her fearsome reputation and the life she’s built.

By Annie Proulx

Working as woodcutters under a feudal lord in 17th-century New France, two impoverished young Frenchmen follow separate journeys, one of extraordinary hardship, the other of wealth and craftiness, that shape their families throughout three centuries.

By Elif Shafak

Turkish teen Asya is coming of age under the wing of her tattoo-parlor owner mother and her three aunts, befriending a cousin from America, and discovering a secret that links her family to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres.

By Elif Shafak
Recommended By Jenn Jordan, Library Aide

Turkish teen Asya is coming of age under the wing of her tattoo-parlor owner mother and her three aunts, befriending a cousin from America, and discovering a secret that links her family to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres.