Why is there a gap in Jules’s baby album? A wry and poignant coming-of-age novel about finding the truth in lies, salvaging hope in heartbreak, and making peace with missing pieces. Eighteen-year-old Jules has always wished for a close-knit family. She never knew her father, and her ex-addict mother has always seemed more interested in artistic endeavors than in bonding with her only daughter. Jules’s life and future look as flat and unchanging as her small Illinois town. Then a simple quest to find a baby picture for the senior yearbook leads to an earth-shattering discovery: for most of the first two years of her life, Jules lived in foster care. Reeling from feelings of betrayal and with only the flimsiest of clues, Jules sets out to learn the truth about her past. What she finds is a wonderful family who loved her as their own and hoped to adopt her — including a now-adult foster brother who is overjoyed to see his sister again. But as her feelings for him spiral into a devastating, catastrophic crush — and the divide between Jules and her mother widens — Jules finds herself on the brink of losing everything.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Colorado Book Award As a working mother and poet-lecturer, Camille Dungy’s livelihood depended on travel. She crisscrossed America and beyond with her daughter in tow, history shadowing their steps, always intensely aware of how they were perceived, not just as mother and child but as black women. From the San Francisco of settlers’ dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana, from snow-white Maine to a festive yet threatening bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods, Dungy finds fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, this is an essential guide for a troubled land.

After the loss of her mother, Zarah goes to visit her aunt, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a young child, but she is greeted instead by a young man named Stein, who introduces himself as her aunt’s son. He seems aggressive from the start, his cold smile no comfort. It turns out that Zarah’s aunt has passed away and left her a huge inheritance. Though it’s a complete surprise to her, Stein believes Zarah is nothing more than a gold digger. Her intention had only been to uncover the mystery of her birth, but the condition of the inheritance states that she must live in her aunt’s house for six months before she can claim her legacy. Will she be able to handle red-hot Stein’s icy attitude until then?

Set in the Michigan landscape that Charles Baxter has made his own, these thirteen exquisite stories illuminate the often curious connections of relatives and strangers. "You can't just get a brother off the street," says the narrator of the title story, but indeed he does. In another, a woman tries to elude her lover's voice by spending an entire day without words. A marriage is jostled by the departure of a friend during a snowstorm. Baxter's stories tend to be love stories, but it is love tinged with fear, even danger, where shock, comedy, and love combine in unexpected ways. Book jacket.

Italian Protestants? Few people seem to have heard of them, but the author's mother's immigrant Italian family was Protestant while his father's were Catholic immigrants from Sicily. Relative Strangers describes the author's search for the religious roots of his parents' families in northern Italy and Sicily. He traces the history of the Waldensians, the Protestant sect which began in Lyon, France in the 12th century, often suffering persecution, but surviving to this day both in Europe and America.

Relative Strangers studies the stepfamily as a social system in its own right, and examines the processes at work in this system. A sociological study of the stepfamily, this book will appeal to social workers, counsellors, family therapists, sociologists, teachers and educated readers interested in the American family.

From the acclaimed author of A Good Family comes a timely spin on Sense and Sensibility, a twenty-first-century family drama featuring two half-Korean sisters, their ex-hippie mother, multiple messy love affairs and one explosive secret that could ruin everything. Amelia Bae-Wood’s life is falling apart. Unemployed, newly single and completely broke—for reasons she hasn’t told anyone yet—she finds herself hitchhiking across California to deal with the fallout of her mother’s eviction from the family estate. Amelia needs somewhere to live and time to figure out what to do with the rest of her life, so moving with her mother and sister to Arcadia, the cancer retreat center where her sister volunteers, seems like as good an idea as any. Amelia’s sister, Eleanor, has too much on her plate, including being caught up in a court battle with a man who claims to be their half brother from Seoul and their late father’s only son—a secret love child from his Korean youth—who’s fighting for a piece of everything that belongs to the Bae-Wood women. And when Amelia adds herself to Eleanor’s list of problems, Eleanor must figure out what to hold on to—and when to let go—before things starts to unravel. A witty, wry and enormously entertaining retelling, the sisters’ journey of self-discovery as they reshape their lives gives this classic tale a modern, feminist twist, as it touches on themes of blended families, race, class and wealth.

Fourteen short stories by St. Louis author Margaret Hermes. Winner of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, selected by Jill McCorkle.

Moving, acutely observed and psychologically deep, this fine novel captures and illuminates past and contemporary relationships. Colin should have the house to himself this Christmas. His flatmates are away and so is his girlfriend, who has gone on holiday without admitting the chill in their relationship. So who is the distraught woman in his lounge, along with a pushchair and screaming baby? Like it or not, Colin must play host to this intriguing, uninvited guest, whose revelations begin to work loose his own tightly guarded secrets.

The McKay family gathers for a week-long holiday at a rambling old house to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Robert and Mary. In recent years only funerals and sudden, severe illnesses have been able to draw them together and as they gather in the splendid rooms of Hunting Manor, their differences are soon uncomfortably apparent. For all their history, their traditions, the connective strands of DNA, they are relative strangers. There are truths unspoken, but the question is: how much truth can a family really stand? The family holiday mushrooms, drawing in sundry relatives both estranged and deranged. The machinations of an appalling, uninvited aunt threaten the holiday - and the family - with irreparable damage. This book will make you question your own family situation. What does it really mean to be 'family'?