Book picks similar to
How We Came to Be: A Novel by Johnnie Bernhard
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fiction
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My Dearest Friend
Nancy Thayer - 1989
Bestselling author Nancy Thayer, renowned for such novels as Stepping, Bodies and Souls, and Three Women at the Water's Edge, returns in My Dearest Friend to the themes she knows so well--love, friendship, courage, betrayal.
Flygirl
R.D. Kardon - 2019
She wants to be a Captain--the only way she knows to prove her worth as a pilot and atone for a deadly mistake. To further her career, Tris accepts a prestigious job with Tetrix, Inc. But her dream of becoming pilot-in-command twists into a nightmare. As the company's first woman pilot, she encounters resistance, marginalization, and harassment on a daily basis. Fortunately, Tris has one thing her co-workers can't deny--skill.In the skies over Europe, Tris, her passengers, and crew are in real danger. With their lives on the line, can Tris earn the respect she's been craving? And if this is the end, can she find the strength to forgive herself?
An Omnibus: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant / The Accidental Tourist / Breathing Lessons
Anne Tyler - 1990
This first omnibus edition of three full-length novels, all set in the respectable Baltimore streets she has made so particularly her own, encompasses the range of eccentricities and compromises to which they are driven. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant follows the disintegration and eventual reaffirmation of the Tull family - fierce, embittered Pearl, left by Beck to raise handsome, thrusting Cody, Jenny, the pediatrician losing herself in devotion to others, and docile Ezra, whose attempts to unite them all around a table at his eccentric Homesick Restaurant are the focus of their differences and their bond. In The Accidental Tourist, Macon - a man of habit and routine, who writes guide books for businessmen who hate to leave home - is confronted by chaos in his own family life. Between aching sadness and glorious absurdity, Macon hesitantly emerges from his sage cocoon into the vibrant, unpredictable world of the outrageous Muriel...And Breathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize, lays bare the anatomy of a marriage. On the round trip to a friend's funeral, Maggie and Ira Moran make detours literal and metaphorical - into the lives of grown children, old friends, total strangers and their own past - and, despite Ira's disappointments and Maggie's optimistic determination to rearrange life as she would like it to be, an old married couple fall in love all over again.
Looking for the Durrells
Melanie Hewitt - 2021
. .After a year that sees a broken-off engagement and the death of her beloved father, Penny is desperate to get away.Fulfilling a childhood dream, she sets off on a month-long pilgrimage to Corfu--an island idyll she knows only through the pages of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals.On the island, Penny quickly finds herself drawn into the lives of a tight-knit circle of strangers. Exploring--searching for the places the Durrells knew decades before--she makes unexpected discoveries about the hopes, fears, and secrets of the people living there today.And as strangers start to be friends, lives past and present become entwined in ways none of them could have predicted. . .
A Hundred Years of Happiness
Nicole Seitz - 2009
An American soldier. A war-torn country. Nearly forty years of silence.Now, two daughters search for the truth they hope will set them free and the elusive peace their parents have never found.In the South Carolina Lowcountry, a young mother named Katherine Ann is struggling to help her tempestuous father by plunging into a world of secrets he never talks about. A fry cook named Lisa is trying desperately to reach her grieving Vietnamese mother who has never fully adjusted to life in the States. And somewhere far away, a lost soul named Ernest is drifting, treading water, searching for what he lost on a long-ago mountain.They're all yearning for connection. For the war that touched them to finally end. For their hundred years of happiness at long last to begin.From the beloved author of The Spirit of Sweetgrass and Trouble the Water comes this generous story of family, war, loss, and longing . . . of the ways we hide from those we love, and the ways that love finds us anyway.
The Stonecutter's Aria
Carol Faenzi - 2005
Over one hundred years later, his spirit reaches out to help his troubled great granddaughter. A dramatic three-act tale spanning a century in the life of a vigorous Italian family.
What I Left Behind
Jennifer Archer - 2020
The owner of a successful restaurant and newly engaged to a man she loves, she’s ready to put her regrets behind her and embrace what lies ahead. But when a boy named Nick Pearson shows up at her door claiming he’s her grandson and needing her help, Ally can no longer ignore the questions that have haunted her since she was sixteen.Leaving her fiancé and her life behind, she embarks on a cross-country road trip with the orphaned teen to find his grandfather – Ally’s first love who disappeared without a word thirty years ago, leading her to give up their baby for adoption. But will learning the devastating reason he tore her life apart release her from the past…or draw her back?In What I Left Behind, bestselling author Jennifer Archer offers an emotional page-turner about love and loss, family and forgiveness.
Heartland
Jenny Pattrick - 2014
Heart - warming and compulsive reading, this is an entertaining, lively and moving novel from one of New Zealand's favourite authors.
The Hideaway
Lauren K. Denton - 2017
She intends to quickly tie up loose ends then return to her busy life and thriving antique shop in New Orleans. Instead, she learns Mags has willed The Hideaway to her and charged her with renovating it—no small task considering her grandmother’s best friends, a motley crew of senior citizens, still live there.Rather than hurrying back to New Orleans, Sara stays in Sweet Bay and begins the biggest house-rehabbing project of her career. Amid drywall dust, old memories, and a charming contractor, she discovers that slipping back into life at The Hideaway is easier than she expected.Then she discovers a box Mags left in the attic with clues to a life Sara never imagined for her grandmother. With help from Mags’s friends, Sara begins to piece together the mysterious life of bravery, passion, and choices that changed her grandmother’s destiny in both marvelous and devastating ways.When an opportunistic land developer threatens to seize The Hideaway, Sara is forced to make a choice—stay in Sweet Bay and fight for the house and the people she’s grown to love or leave again and return to her successful but solitary life in New Orleans.
The Little Ice Cream Shop By The Sea
Lizzie Chantree - 2021
Their seafront business is failing with the loss of Genie’s grandmother and her legendary ice cream flavours. Genie is determined to be the one to save her family’s heritage, but suddenly her mother wants to sell to developers and leave their shared history behind.Buying the business and taking on a sixty-eight year old business partner, Ada, with a mysterious past and a gorgeous but distracting grandson, Genie sets out to prove her parents wrong.Ada’s grandson, Cal, wants to protect his gran from ‘pensioner persuader’, Genie, but soon realises that living in a little seaside town and away from the paparazzi in Hollywood can actually give him time to heal. Hiding in a seafront business with its fiery owner and working as kitchen staff, is the only way he can think of to keep his ex-Hollywood glamour-puss, gran from harm. But his meddling might also ruin Ada's second chance at love. Hiring a private detective and learning about Genie’s parent’s past makes Cal regret his own impulsiveness. The information he has unearthed could destroy their blossoming romance and turn Genie’s world upside down.Genie soon discovers that friends can become enemies and your closest family can have lied to you for your whole life.
The Law of the Sea : A Legal Thriller
Dave Gerard - 2021
The rarest of these are worth colossal fortunes, and can make their finders fabulously wealthy in the blink of an eye.Against this backdrop, young Houston lawyer Jack Carver meets his newest client, Ashley Marcum. She is looking for help after the mysterious death of her brother, who died while working for a giant oil company. Jack and Ashley’s only clue about his death is a set of unidentified gold coins, of indeterminate age and value.As Jack and Ashley scramble to discover how her brother died and uncover the origin of the coins, the oil company sends their powerful lawyers to stop them. Jack and Ashley soon find themselves caught up in a legal battle to uncover the truth—a battle they are ill-equipped to win.As the saga unfolds, Jack and Ashley soon discover that the coins belong to an ancient shipwreck—perhaps one of the greatest of all time. As the oil company tries to subvert legal process and shut them out, Jack and Ashley are forced to fight a case that begins in Texas but soon spreads across the globe.Amidst twists, turns, and roadblocks, Jack and Ashley must race through a history shrouded in secrets, spurred on by a case that ignites a firestorm around the world.
A Family Secret
Libby Ashworth - 2021
Meanwhile, her older sister Peggy works as an apprentice at the Girls' School, hoping for a more prosperous future as a schoolteacher.Jennet and Titus Eastwood have always made decisions for their daughters' futures. But as the sisters near adulthood they are determined to make their own choices. And with temptation in the way, will the girls find love - or infatuation - leads them astray?Then an unexpected but familiar face arrives in town, and the family's future is threatened. For Bessie and Jennet, a difficult choice must be made - love or family . . .
Last Resort on the Coast
Sage Parker - 2021
You have to come home. I can’t run this place on my own.”From Amazon #1 Best Selling Author...Sarah Edwards is living her dream as a highly acclaimed marine biologist, settled in a beautiful downtown apartment with nothing but a bright future ahead...That is, until she receives a phone call that changes everything.Her mother’s untimely death not only leaves her devastated - it leaves her with so many unanswered questions and responsibilities she’s not ready to take on. As an only child, she finds herself at the helm of a high-scale resort on the coast of California.Now she's faced with a life-altering decision. To sell the resort her mother dedicated her entire life to, or move back to California to run the resort - leaving behind the dream life she's worked so hard to build.While traveling across the country to comfort her grandmother, Sarah meets a charming stranger and offers him a complimentary stay at the resort in exchange for a lighthearted distraction.But when Sarah stumbles upon a letter written just weeks before the accident - her mother's final words leave her no choice but to continue on with the search in her place…Embark on this adventure filled with mystery, diversions, and unsettling details that might just be the answer to Sarah's biggest questions.This is Book 1 of 6 in the Search for Truth series.
Sugar & Skeletons (Wicked Witches of Brookdale Book 3)
Sara Bourgeois - 2021
No great loss, but Jenny Mae might just be a suspect. Can Fern clear her name and find the real culprit?
More importantly, will Gumbo get his carrot cake?