domestic fiction

Beautiful Undine Spragg from Apex, Kansas, is a social climber. Her society career, marriages, divorces, and conquests are all part of her greed.

When Em Morales's older sister was raped, her world was turned upside down. Her family thought her sister was going to get real justice when the jury found the rapist guilty, but the judges sentences the rapist to no prison time, shattering any sense of hope. Em is sick with rage and guilt, but she finds a way to heal through writing poems about a fifteenth-century French noblewoman, Marguerite de Bressieux, who was legendary as an avenging knight for rape victims.

In September of 2018, one family in rural Starkfield, Massachusetts, finds the cultural, social, and political issues of the day becoming intensely personal, throwing their marriage, family life, their past, their future, and their values into doubt. Ethan Frome's wife, Zo, turns their home into a headquarters for the "Resistance" of women that has risen up against a Supreme Court nominee, while at the same time his old roommate and business partner is facing "metoo" allegations. His daughter, Alex, becomes more unruly and headstrong, and then Maddy Silver, the breezy, blue-dyed hair millennial, throws a further wrench into everything.

Clare's world is turned upside down when she finds a box full of her great-grandmother's letters from Germany to her grandmother, Annelise, who left for America during World War II. When she discovers the realities of her family's sacrifice, she's faced with an impossible choice.

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.