Single, twenty-three, she’s living in a New York City rent-stabilized walk-up, a bird’s nest of an apartment outfitted as much by serendipity as by intent: note the three-legged bedside table, her squat hand-painted pine dresser, a splotchy framed mirror, the spindled bathroom corner shelf—all found curbside on garbage day.Her perfect older sister, Pia, lives in an endless house in Connecticut with her handsome, thick-haired husband, Will, her tween daughter, Emma, and a frothy, russet-colored Labradoodle named Root Beer. Pia is altogether Muriel’s opposite. Muriel eats takeout from the carton; Pia makes salads from the microgreens in her garden. Pia takes “me” time to pray and do yoga. She believes every word in the bible, her faith pure and unquestioning. Pia is remarkably like their mother, Lidia. Or so Lidia would have Pia believe. Muriel knows better. Years earlier she discovered the truth about her mother’s lies—not that she’ll ever tell.The story begins on an ordinary Saturday which turns out to be anything but. When Pia calls Muriel out of the blue, Muriel expects the same lecture about slimming down, toning up, highlighting her hair, getting a better job, and moving into an elevator building. Only this time it’s different. Distressingly so. Pia takes the train into the city to visit her sister and leave her with—yet another—terrible secret she is sworn to keep.

    The three Bentley children are used to fending for themselves. Their widowed mother has been forced to take a night job at Grant’s clothing factory, and sees them only at breakfast and on Sundays. But at nearly eighteen, and with a job as a housemaid to help make ends meet, Dora is well able to look after her younger siblings Tom and Lily. Then one morning their mother fails to appear for breakfast, and when Dora is told by the gatekeeper at Grant’s factory that no one by the name of Harriet Bentley has ever worked there, the children grow worried. They know their mother loves them, and cannot believe she would deliberately deceive them. With the help of a neighbour, a former policeman who was badly injured during the War, Dora and her siblings start to investigate.

    This novel tells a story of sex and longing, love and loss, and of the deceit that can lie at the heart of family relationships. Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present. In a family driven as much by jealousy and propriety as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic lives, it takes astonishing courage and compassion to bring them back together. By turns funny and disturbing, irreverent and profound, Liars and Saints is a masterful display of Maile Meloy's prodigious gifts and of her penetrating insight into an extraordinary American family and into the nature of human love.

    She lost her mother some years before, and her beloved grandmother has just passed away. And now her father has left town to work on a top-secret military project at Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. Helen is wise beyond her years, but a ten-year-old cannot be left on her own to fend for herself. Her father arranges a summer guardian, Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year-old first cousin who cries at the drop of a hat. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact, with all its ghosts and stories. Flora is the good-hearted, modest cousin who wants to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played out against a backdrop of a lost America, will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

    When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family—in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia—in order to succeed.Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest—though increasingly unstable—weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli’s The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player.

    Carl Voigt had been a WWI prisoner of war who had married a cockney girl and never gone back. Now widowed, he and Kate were part of the London life of the square with all its rumbustious and colorful characters. Then came the war.Suddenly it seemed the Voigts were outcasts because if their German blood. When Carl was interned, Kate's only support was her best friend Carrie, and Toby, the R.A.F. pilot whom she loved. Finally when Toby was killed, and even Carrie turned against her, she found herself pregnant and totally alone.Late one Christmas Eve, during the Blitz, she was approached by a wounded sailor asking for lodgings. Leon Emmerson, like Kate, was also a lonely misfit because of his parentage. It was to be the beginning of a new friendship, of startling and dramatic events in Kate's life. And as the war progressed, as the Londoners fought to help each other while their city was bombed and burned, so the rifts in the community were healed, and Kate and those she loved became, once more, part of Magnolia Square.

    She's embarrassed by her German father, never knowing what he may or may not have done during the war.In 1995 Leeds, Eliza is a young woman in love - with her life as a dance student, and with her boyfriend Cosmo. But Eliza is living a lie, running away from a past of which she was always ashamed. But when her mother dies and she is called home, she can no longer deny her roots, even if it will cost her everything.And woven throughout the novel is Ernst's story - Ernst is one of two brothers growing up in Nazi Germany. One rallied for the Fuhrer, one held back. One dedicated his life to the Nazi regime, one did not.When Eliza learns a long-buried family secret, it will completely change how she views her past and her future.By exploring identity, memory, and history, Saskia Sarginson deftly shows that it is the people we think we know the best who sometimes surprise us the most.

    At the heart of the novel is Giovanna, whose family is targeted by the notorious Black Hand--the precursor to the Mafia. Elizabeth Street brings to light a period in history when Italian immigrant neighborhoods lived in fear of Black Hand extortion and violence--a reality that defies the romanticized depiction of the Mafia. Here, the author reveals the merciless terror of the Black Hand-and the impact their crimes had on her family. Giovanna is based on Fabiano's great-grandmother, and the book's heroes and villains - such as Lieutenant Petrosino, the crusading cop and "Lupo the Wolf," a cold-blooded criminal - are drawn from real life in this thrilling tale. While set in a dynamic historical context, Elizabeth Street is, above all, the dramatic story of the heroine, Giovanna, and how she triumphed over tragedy.

    Alice is married to John, Cora to his hapless younger brother Billie. Both women give birth to sons on one chaotic night in 1940. It is Cora's jealousy and resentment that prompts her to swap her puny baby for Alice's beautiful son. With Alice's marriage in tatters, she borrows money from Cora in order to purchase the lease of the tiny hairdresser where she works. Alice is talented; the business thrives and a chain of salons becomes Laceys of Liverpool. The relationships between the cousins Cormac and Maurice, their parents, Alice's three girls and their eventual husbands and children, combine to give a unique picture of Liverpool in the last sixty years of the twentieth century.

    He can’t have been much of a husband to Trudy, either, judging by her sudden departure. It’s only when she returns, pregnant to someone else, that he discovers his surprising talent as a father. So when Trudy finds Jesus and takes little Peter away with her to join the holy rollers, Tom’s heart breaks all over again.Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew—and the most vivid person—Tom has ever met. He dares to believe they could make each other happy. But it is 1968: twenty-four years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz. Tom Hope is taking on a batttle with heartbreak he can barely even begin to imagine.

    Their tragic connection is slowly revealed as the book unfolds.Wake: 1) Emerge or cause to emerge from sleep 2) Ritual for the dead 3) Consequence or aftermath.Hettie, a dance instructress at the Palais, lives at home with her mother and her brother, mute and lost after his return from the war. One night, at work, she meets a wealthy, educated man and has reason to think he is as smitten with her as she is with him. Still there is something distracted about him, something she cannot reach...Evelyn works at the Pensions Exchange through which thousands of men have claimed benefits from wounds or debilitating distress. Embittered by her own loss, more and more estranged from her posh parents, she looks for solace in her adored brother who has not been the same since he returned from the front...Ada is beset by visions of her son on every street, convinced he is still alive. Helpless, her loving husband of 25 years has withdrawn from her. Then one day a young man appears at her door with notions to peddle, like hundreds of out of work veterans. But when he shows signs of being seriously disturbed—she recognizes the symptoms of "shell shock"—and utters the name of her son she is jolted to the core...The lives of these three women are braided together, their stories gathering tremendous power as the ties that bind them become clear, and the body of the unknown soldier moves closer and closer to its final resting place.

    Neva Bradley, a third-generation midwife, is determined to keep the details surrounding her own pregnancy—including the identity of the baby’s father— hidden from her family and co-workers for as long as possible. Her mother, Grace, finds it impossible to let this secret rest. For Floss, Neva’s grandmother and a retired midwife, Neva’s situation thrusts her back 60 years in time to a secret that eerily mirrors her granddaughter’s—a secret which, if revealed, will have life-changing consequences for them all. Will these women reveal their secrets and deal with the inevitable consequences? Or are some secrets best kept hidden?

    This is the story of the Hastings family - their secrets, their loves and losses, dreams and heartbreaks - captured in a seamless series of individual moments that span the years between the First World War and the present. The novel opens in 1914 as William, a young factory worker, spends one last evening at home before his departure for the navy... His son, Billy, grows into a champion cyclist and will ride into the D-Day landings on a military bicycle... His son in turn, Will, struggles with a debilitating handicap to become an Oxford professor in the 1960s... And finally, young Billie Hastings makes a life for herself as an artist in contemporary London. Just as the names echo down through the family, so too does the legacy of choices made, chances lost, and truths long buried.

    As the Cazalet households prepare for their summer pilgrimage to the family estate in Sussex, readers meet Edward, in love with but by no means faithful to his wife Villy; Hugh, wounded in the Great War; Rupert, who worships his lovely child-bride Zoe; and Rachel, the spinster sister.

    In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed its harbors. Then, barred from entering the United States, they lived in Cuba for almost two years before emigrating to New York. This sweeping account of one family’s escape from the turmoil of war-torn Europe hangs upon the intimate and deeply personal story of Maitland’s mother’s passionate romance with a Catholic Frenchman. Separated by war and her family’s disapproval, the young lovers—Janine and Roland—lose each other for fifty years. It is a testimony to both Maitland’s investigative skills and her devotion to her mother that she successfully traced the lost Roland and was able to reunite him with Janine. Unlike so many stories of love during wartime, theirs has a happy ending.