National Network for Equitable Library Service

Toby Jones and Holliday Grainger star in a new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Dodie Smith's enduringly popular coming-of-age novel. In the 1930s, seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain lives in a crumbling ruin of a castle in the Suffolk countryside. Her father, an author wrestling with writer's block, spends his time reading detective stories; her bohemian stepmother Topaz is an artist's model, and her beautiful older sister Rose is determined to escape the poverty of their existence - ideally by marriage to a rich man.

When Indian American journalist Smita returns to India to write the story of a young widow Meena and the murder of her husband, it's Smita's first time back since her family left when she was a child. Both Smita and Meena were raised in a culture where a woman exercising a basic human right--the right to love and marry whoever she chooses--is met with brutal punishment. While Meena's fate hangs in the balance, Smita must reckon with the privilege that becoming an American has given her, as well as face the trauma that shaped her as a child and led to her family leaving.

Glory Boughton has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

In this captivating novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel, five successful women play for high stakes in their careers at a boutique literary and talent agency. Jane Addison is an ambitious young woman with big dreams of owning her own company someday. At twenty-eight, she arrives in New York to start a job at Fletcher and Benson, a prestigious talent agency. Eager to impress her new colleagues, Jane jumps right in as an assistant to Hailey West, one of the agents in the literary department.

The explosive debut novel-about family, power and privilege-from the creator of the award-winning Mad Men. Mark and Karen Breakstone have constructed the idyllic life of wealth and status they always wanted, made complete by their beautiful and extraordinary daughter Heather. But they are still not quite at the top. When the new owners of the penthouse above them begin construction, an unstable stranger penetrates the security of their comfortable lives and threatens to destroy everything they've created.

For decades, the Holloways have operated a convenience store in the working-class neighborhood of Rabbittown in St. John's, and every customer has a story. In a vibrant, contemporary family saga, filled with idiosyncratic characters, Trudy Morgan-Cole tells the tale of three generations of Holloway women—Ellen, Audrey, and Rachel—their loves and their livelihood in times of great change. Most Anything You Please captures the spirit of a community and the women who hold it together, revealing the bonds that break and the ties that bind.

A heartrending novel about one man's search for meaning in a difficult life A child ridiculed for his weight, a son overshadowed by a favored brother, a husband who falls short of his wife's ambitions, an old man with a broken heart… As Orbits's life passes, he doggedly pursues a simple dream — a little place in the country where a family might thrive — while wondering if he can ever shake free of the tragedies that seem to define him.  Fatboy Fall Down is the lush and heartbreaking musings of a man trying to understand his place in the world.

Welcome to Blind Crescent, where everyone is watching, but nobody sees a thing. In this fictitious slice of suburban life, Michelle Berry peels back the pretensions of manicured lawns and the rictus smiles of friendly neighbours. With a deft hand, she paints a picture of suburbia so absurdly real that every suburbanite reader can’t help but feel strangely at home.

Catherine, an archivist, has spent decades committed to conserving the pasts of others, only to find her own resurfacing on the eve of her retirement. Carefully, she mines the failing memories of her aging mother to revive a mysterious Uncle and relive the tragic downfall of her brother. Catherine remembers, and in the process, discovers darker family secrets, long silenced, and their devastating aftermath.

The Daughter Who Walked Away describes the tribulations of three generations of Iranian women. In 1919, a woman who can no longer afford to raise her nine-year-old niece, Batoul, marries the girl to the young son of a Shirazi family. Ashamed and traumatized, yet resourceful and resolute, Batoul rears her children to expect hardships and to endure them discreetly. Despite her best intentions, she plants the seeds of dysfunction. In 1967, Batoul's youngest, Mojegan, pursues a nursing career in Tehran. While intelligent and ambitious, Mojegan is naïve about intimate relationships.