domestic fiction

A Washington D.C. artist named Laura returns to Thailand to search for her brother Philip who disappeared more than forty years ago when her family was stationed there during the Vietnam War. After bringing a man home, Laura and her sister Bea try to figure out if he's really their brother and how to deliver the news to their mother who has dementia.

During the Great Depression, thirteen-year-old Cub's father turns to moonshine to put food on the table. The local sheriff catches wind and threatens Cub with an orphanage and Pa with jail if he doesn't stop. It grows more complicated when a big-city mobster comes around and makes Pa an offer he can't refuse. Desperate for his father to live a legal life, Cub intervenes, with terrible results. His father injured, Cub is forced to grow up fast before things turn deadly.

The lives of four women intersect in a miraculous way when India Bishop, having married and then fallen in love with a wealthy older man, decides to cement their relationship with a baby, despite the disapproval of his grown daughter Bettina, and turns to Princeton student and egg donor Jules Strauss, and surrogate mother Annie Barrow, for help.

The only thing Rumi Seto knows for certain that she absolutely wants is to go on writing music with her younger sister, Lea, for the rest of her life. Then, Lea dies in a car accident, and Rumi finds herself sent away to live with her aunt in Hawaii while her mother deals with her grief. Rumi feels the loss, abandonment, and absence of her sister, mother, and of the music, but she also meets the "boys next door," one the smiling Kai, a teenage surfer, and the other the elderly George Watanabe, a man who is dealing with his own grief. With their help, Rumi may be able to find her way back to life, and finish the song she and Lea had been working on.

During a New Year's Eve party just before Oona Lockhart turns nineteen, she ponders her future choices--whether to stay with her boyfriend and band in Brooklyn or leave for London to study economics. As the ball drops, she's transported into the future life of her fifty-one-year-old self. And each year thereafter on December thirty-first, Oona travels back and forward to various parts of her life in the future where she learns about living in the moment and the consequences of past decisions.

Twelve-year-old Iris and her grandmother, both deaf, drive from Texas to Alaska armed with Iris's plan to help Blue-55, a whale unable to communicate with other whales.

Jack, terminally ill, is helpless when his wife Lizzie is killed in a car accident and his three children separated, sent to live with family members across the country, but a miraculous turn of events puts Jack on the road to recovery and he sets out to put his family back together over the course of a summer spent at Lizzie's childhood home in South Carolina.

Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon, the victim of a sexual assault and murder, looks on from the afterlife as her family deals with their grief, and waits for her killer to be brought to some type of justice.

The adult debut from bestselling, award-winning young adult author Jaclyn Moriarty--a frequently hilarious, brilliantly observed novel--that follows a single mother's heartfelt search for greater truths about the universe, her family and herself."I loved this book. . . .Funny, heartbreaking and clever with a mystery at its heart." -Jojo Moyes"With an eye as keen for human idiosyncrasies as Miranda July's, and a sense of humor as bright and surprising as Maria Semple's, this is a novel of pure velocity." -Publishers Weekly (starred?review)Twenty years ago, Abigail Sorenson's brother Robert went missing one day before her sixteenth birthday, never to be seen again. That same year, she began receiving scattered chapters in the mail of a self-help manual, the Guidebook, whose anonymous author promised to make her life soar to heights beyond her wildest dreams.The Guidebook's missives have remained a constant in Abi's life--a befuddling yet oddly comforting voice through her family's grief over her brother's disappearance, a move across continents, the devastating dissolution of her marriage, and the new beginning as a single mother and caf? owner in Sydney.Now, two decades after receiving those first pages, Abi is invited to an all-expenses paid weekend retreat to learn "the truth" about the Guidebook. It's an opportunity too intriguing to refuse. If Everything is Connected, then surely the twin mysteries of the Guidebook and a missing brother must be linked? What follows is completely the opposite of what Abi expected--but it will lead her on a journey of discovery that will change her life--and enchant readers. Gravity Is the Thing is a smart, unusual, wickedly funny novel about the search for happiness that will break your heart into a million pieces and put it back together, bigger and better than before.

In 1956, toward the end of his life, Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, sharing the story of his life and explaining how his faith influenced his choices and actions.