National Network for Equitable Library Service

A novel about fatherhood, grief, unanswerable questions, and the small, magical moments that make up life. Keith has always striven to break rules as he navigates full-time parenting and supports the career of his successful photographer wife. Her unexpected illness and death leaves both him and his son Charlie in bits. When they take a road trip, a journey begins that does not end when they return home. Keith must deal with revelations that complicate his grief, even as Charlie's response is unsettling. Together, father and son connect with loved ones, strangers, and each other.

When an accident upends their lives, fourteen-year-old Shiloh and her mother Ruth must leave their idyllic home to make a new life in the city. They find housing through an evangelical church operating out of a strip mall that backs onto the grounds of the abandoned Pacific Hospital for the Mind. Their lives begin to intersect with their new neighbours: Raymond, a handyman whose painful past is coming to a head; Dave, the disillusioned pastor looking for a new wife; and Madeleine, a 90-year-old former nurse who continues to make pilgrimages to the graves of the patients she once cared for.

Robert lost his father before he'd even been born, and was quickly abandoned by his young mother to be raised by his grandparents in small-town Saskatchewan. In another sense, though, Robert never lost his father, whose ghostly presence lingers in the young boy's life over the years by means of spectral "advice letters" on how to be a man. When Robert finds an old pump organ in a derelict farmhouse, he discovers a deep love of and talent for performing music.

Brooklyn, 1947: In the midst of a blizzard, in a two-family brownstone, two babies are born, minutes apart. The mothers are sisters by marriage: dutiful, quiet Rose, who wants nothing more than to please her difficult husband; and warm, generous Helen, the exhausted mother of four rambunctious boys who seem to need her less and less each day. Raising their families side by side, supporting one another, Rose and Helen share an impenetrable bond forged before and during that dramatic winter night.

This program includes an author's note read by the author and a conversation between the author and Audie Award–winning narrator Patti Murin. "Murin guarantees Frankel's story is impeccably, convincingly, utterly heard. A creative process-illuminating author/narrator 'geeking out' interview provides a delightful aural bonus." —Booklist. "Not all stories of adoption are stories of pain and regret. Not even most of them. Why don't we ever get that movie?" India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor.

Sisters, secrets, love, and murder... Sally Hepworth's novel *Darling Girls* has it all. For as long as they can remember, Jessica, Norah, and Alicia have been told how lucky they are. As young girls, they were rescued from family tragedies and raised by a loving foster mother, Miss Fairchild, on an idyllic farming estate and given an elusive second chance at a happy family life. But their childhood wasn't the fairy tale everyone thinks it was. Miss Fairchild had rules. Miss Fairchild could be unpredictable. And Miss Fairchild was never, ever to be crossed.

New York Times bestseller. The one and only Fannie Flagg, beloved author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Can't Wait to Get to Heaven, and I Still Dream About You, is at her hilarious and superb best in this new comic mystery novel about two women who are forced to reimagine who they are. Mrs. Sookie Poole of Point Clear, Alabama, has just married off the last of her daughters and is looking forward to relaxing and perhaps traveling with her husband, Earle. The only thing left to contend with is her mother, the formidable Lenore Simmons Krackenberry.

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When the bonds in their family begin to fray, four Black women fight to preserve their legacy, heal their wounds, and move forward together in this heartwarming contemporary debut novel with loose parallels to beloved women from the Bible. "The surprises and heart in this fast-paced family drama kept me turning pages late into the night." -KJ Dell'Antonia, New York Times bestselling author of The Chicken Sisters. The four women of the Gardin family live side-by-side in Edin, Georgia, but residing in tight proximity doesn't mean everything is picture-perfect.

"All hail Jami Attenberg, the queen of dysfunctional families." —Refinery29. "Big Little Lies meets Succession in the scorching heat of the Big Easy . . . Money, power and family are touched upon through Attenberg's emotional, humorous and sharply written accounts." —Parade. "This is how you write a very good novel about a very bad man." —New York Times. From critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a novel of family secrets: think the drama of Big Little Lies set in the heat of a New Orleans summer.