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All the Best People


Sonja Yoerg - 2017
    Vermont, 1972. Carole LaPorte has a satisfying, ordinary life. She cares for her children, balances the books for the family’s auto shop and laughs when her husband slow dances her across the kitchen floor. Her tragic childhood might have happened to someone else. But now her mind is playing tricks on her. The accounts won’t reconcile and the murmuring she hears isn’t the television. She ought to seek help, but she’s terrified of being locked away in a mental hospital like her mother, Solange. So Carole hides her symptoms, withdraws from her family and unwittingly sets her eleven-year-old daughter Alison on a desperate search for meaning and power: in Tarot cards, in omens from a nearby river and in a mysterious blue glass box belonging to her grandmother. An exploration of the power of courage and love to overcome a damning legacy, All the Best People celebrates the search for identity and grace in the most ordinary lives.

The Future Was Now


J.R. Harber - 2020
    Gabriel is the best Contract Enforcer the State has ever created, trained from childhood to efficiently identify and eliminate threats to society’s vital balance and ensure every citizen adheres to their Social Contract.Asa has spent his life in one of the State’s carefully planned farming communities, but he yearns for something more. The day after his twenty-first birthday, he sets out for the metropolis of Horizon—but compliance with his Social Contract turns out to be more complicated than he could have imagined. He soon meets the girl of his dreams, Eve, an outsider in Horizon who has learned to survive for years using her guile and beauty.When an unexpected tragedy forces Asa and Eve to go on the run, Gabriel is determined to track them down and deliver the State’s justice. Their joined paths will take them into the Waste, farther away from the State’s seemingly omnipresent gaze than any of them have ever been. The truths they uncover will force them to reexamine everything they know.

The Second First Time


Elisa Lorello - 2016
    

The Traveller’s Daughter


Michelle Vernal - 2015
    The hurt and pain, the guilt over what she'd done, was something she could never face. But now the time has come to share the truth of Kitty's heritage...Her daughter's discovery...Kitty never knew anything about her mother's early life. But after her death, the discovery of Rosa's journal opens Kitty's eyes to a whole new world-a family she's never known and a love she's never dreamed of...The fate of a family...Now Kitty must travel to her mother's homeland, but after fifty years, can the sins of the past be forgiven? Or will history repeat itself? With a decades-old family feud threatening her future, can Kitty put right what once went so wrong?Join Kitty as she follows in her mother's footsteps from the South of France to Ireland, discovering who she is along the way in this beautiful tale of forbidden love and fancy cupcakes!What readers are saying about 'The Traveller's Daughter':'A lovely feel-good read' Katie's Bookends'If you like family sagas and romance, then look no further...at the end you feel like you are leaving behind new friends' Lorraine, Goodreads'A beautiful and thought-provoking book' Artistic Bent Book Blog

Summer on the Bluffs


Sunny Hostin - 2021
    Known for its gingerbread Victorian-style houses and modern architectural marvels, this picturesque town hugging the sea is a mecca for the crème de la crème of black society—where Michelle and Barack Obama vacation and Meghan Markle has shopped for a house for her mom. Black people have lived in this pretty slip of the Vineyard since the 1600s and began buying property in the 1800s, making this posh town the embodiment of “old money.”Every summer, Esperenza “Perry” Soto, a beautiful and talented Afro-Latina lawyer, escapes the fetid heat of New York City for the gorgeous weather, cool water, and stunning views Oak Bluffs offers. Sharing a cottage on the beach, owned by her “Ama”, with her husband and two god sisters, Perry is looking forward to trading meetings and clients for days of languor and fun.When Memorial Day arrives and the season begins, some of the nation’s wealthiest, most powerful, and famous from the worlds of politics, art, and entertainment meet to swim, dance, party, and chill. While a few can’t leave work behind, others indulge in a different kind of business affair. But this summer on the Bluffs is different. Ama is moving to the south of France to reunite with her college sweetheart. She is going to give the house to one of her goddaughters and she has invited all three of them to spend the summer with her the way they did when they were kids. Each of the women want the house desperately. Each is grappling with a secret that they fear will make them lose Ama’s approval and the house. . . .

The Rift


Rachel Lynch - 2021
    But will that mean justice?As a high-ranking woman in the Royal Military Police, Major Helen Scott gets the job done – no matter the task. So when she is pulled in to lead a NATO summit security team in Paris, it barely causes a ripple. Yet within hours she’s dispatched to Lyon on a new mission. One with a complex problem at its heart.Kahlil Dalmani and Fawaz bin Nabil were close in childhood, growing up in the hubbub of Algiers. As men, they are both wildly successful. Yet their paths to fortune have caused a rift. Fawaz’s empire is built on illegal trade, and when his estranged friend refuses to grant a favour he seeks to change Kahlil’s mind the best way he knows how: kidnapping his son, Hakim.Working out of the Interpol headquarters, Helen must unpick a web of deceit that spreads across borders and dates back years. Only by trusting those from her own painful past can she hope to return Hakim to his family. But with her focus on saving one life, she risks overlooking a plan that puts many others in grave danger.An explosive and gripping crime thriller from one of the most brilliant British crime fiction authors of recent years. For fans of Angela Marsons and Lee Child.

Instamom


Chantel Guertin - 2021
    . .It’s the influencer’s golden rule: know your niche. Kit Kidding has found hers on Instagram, where she gets paid to promote brands and share expertly curated posts about her fun, fabulous, child-free life. Kit likes kids just fine, but she passionately believes that women who choose not to become mothers shouldn’t have to face guilt. Or judgement. Or really hot chefs who turn out to be single dads. Will MacGregor is aggravating, sexy, persistent, averse to social media, and definitely a bad idea. As soon as Kit learns his parenting status, she vows to put their scorching one-night stand behind her and move on. But Will and Kit are thrown together on an Instagram campaign, and the more time she spends with him—and his whip-smart, eight-year-old daughter, Addie—the more difficult it is to stay away, much less sustain what Will so cleverly calls her “Resting Beach Face.” Kit’s picture-perfect career path is suddenly clashing with the possibility of a different future—messy, complicated, and real. Which life does she truly want? Will she have to re-invent herself? And will love still be waiting by the time she figures it out?

Paris Never Leaves You


Ellen Feldman - 2020
    But can she survive the next chapter of her life?Alternating between wartime Paris and 1950s New York publishing, Paris Never Leaves You is an extraordinary story of resilience, love, and impossible choices, exploring how survival never comes without a cost. The war is over, but the past is never past.

The White City


Grace Hitchcock - 2019
    She tries to convince her father, an inspector with the Chicago police, to look into reports of mysterious disappearances around the White City. Inspector Wylde tries to dismiss her claims as exaggeration of an overactive imagination, but he eventually concedes to letting her go undercover as secretary to the man in question—if she takes her pistol for protection and Jude Thorpe, a policeman, for bodyguard.Will she be able to expose H. H. Holmes’s illicit activity, or will Winnifred become his next victim?

Echoes of Family


Barbara Claypole White - 2016
    She left behind secrets, memories, and tragedy: one teen dead, and her first love, Gabriel, badly injured. Three decades later she’s finally found peace in the North Carolina recording studio she runs with her husband, Darius, and her almost-daughter, Jade…until another fatality propels her back across the ocean to confront the long-buried past.In her picturesque childhood village, the first person she meets is the last person she wants to see again: Gabriel. Now the village vicar, he takes her in without question, and ripples of what if reverberate through both their hearts. As Marianne’s mind unravels, Jade and Darius track her down. Tempers clash when everyone tries to help, but only by finding the courage to face her illness can Marianne heal herself and her offbeat family.

A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall


Andy Abramowitz - 2020
    Brothers and sisters. Mothers and daughters. Okay, everybody. Hold on tight. Davis Winger has it all. A respected engineer who designs roller coasters in theme parks across the country, he is deeply in love with his wife and has a beautiful young daughter and a happy home. Until an accident strikes on one of his rides. Nothing fatal—except to his career. And to his marriage, when a betrayal from his past inadvertently comes to light. In one cosmically bad day, Davis loses it all.His sister, Molly, is at a crossroads herself. She’s coasting through a dire relationship with an incompatible man-child. And she’s a journalist whose deeply personal columns about mothers and daughters are forcing her to confront the truth about her own mother, who abandoned Molly and Davis years ago and disappeared.For these two siblings, it’s just a matter of bracing themselves for one turbulent summer in this redemptive and painfully funny family drama about making the best of the sharp turns in life—those we choose to take and those beyond our control.

Now Lorraine Has Gone


Jeff Lowder - 2020
    Daniel Horvath's not-quite-ex-wife dies unexpectedly, a woman he has been avoiding for thirty years rings his doorbell-and flips his predictable life on its head. Can she help untangle the emotional and financial knots Lorraine left him tied up in?Will a young temptress at his clinic ruin everything?And...can a little French bulldog named Lylou help Danny discover the love and family he yearns for?

The Sweeney Sisters


Lian Dolan - 2020
    But their mother’s death from cancer fifteen years ago tarnished their golden-hued memories, and the sisters drifted apart. Their one touchstone is their father, Bill Sweeney, an internationally famous literary lion and college professor universally adored by critics, publishers, and book lovers. When Bill dies unexpectedly one cool June night, his shell-shocked daughters return to their childhood home. They aren’t quite sure what the future holds without their larger-than-life father, but they do know how to throw an Irish wake to honor a man of his stature.But as guests pay their respects and reminisce, one stranger, emboldened by whiskey, has crashed the party. It turns out that she too is a Sweeney sister.When Washington, DC based journalist Serena Tucker had her DNA tested on a whim a few weeks earlier, she learned she had a 50% genetic match with a childhood neighbor—Maggie Sweeney of Southport, Connecticut. It seems Serena’s chilly WASP mother, Birdie, had a history with Bill Sweeney—one that has remained totally secret until now.Once the shock wears off, questions abound. What does this mean for William’s literary legacy? Where is the unfinished memoir he’s stashed away, and what will it reveal? And how will a fourth Sweeney sister—a blond among redheads—fit into their story?By turns revealing, insightful, and uproarious, The Sweeney Sisters is equal parts cautionary tale and celebration—a festive and heartfelt look at what truly makes a family.

The Summer I Found Myself


Colleen French - 2021
    In her more honest moments, Ellen might admit that she's sick of loss. She longs to stretch and grow, to truly fill her days. Maybe this year, she'll have something to recount in her Christmas letter other than her son's travel adventures. Maybe she'll be too busy to even write a Christmas letter. On impulse, Ellen invites her ailing best friend, Lara, to spend the summer with her at the Delaware beach house she inherited from her parents. Lara can relax on the big front porch after chemo while Ellen readies the house for sale. But Lara has plans too--she'd like to help Ellen discover who she is, or better yet, who she can still become. At Lara's urging, Ellen joins a local writer's group, tries online dating, and mingles with the new friends Lara brings home from her support group. She forgoes white wine (won't stain if you spill it!) for red and eats French fries for breakfast. She even flirts with the local bookstore owner, a handsome, sun-kissed, younger man. And as she embraces the freedom that comes with breaking her own rules, she wonders if it's not just her past that lies in this beloved quirky town, but her future too...

Turn Towards the Sun


Emma Davies - 2017
    So when she is offered the chance to live and work at Rowan Hill, a beautiful country estate and bustling community of artists, it feels like a dream come true.But soon after her arrival a series of accidents and misunderstandings begins to threaten the happiness and livelihoods of everyone at Rowan Hill. And when suspicion quickly falls on Lizzie, she discovers that the past is not so easily forgotten.To keep the life she has just begun to build, Lizzie will have to race to uncover the truth before there are disastrous repercussions for everyone involved. In this heartwarming story of friendship, loss and love, the stakes are high but so are the rewards. If Lizzie can find a way to stay true to herself, she might have a chance at something she has always wanted: a place to call home.