Two half sisters, one black and one white, embark on a risky road trip through the 1950s Jim Crow South in this spellbinding story of identity and race.Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for "colored music" and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenaged girls are half sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs.In an old junker of a car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the American Deep South of the 1950s, a bewitchingly beautiful landscape as well as one bedeviled by racial striving and violence.
The Foreign Land of the Very Wealthy - otherwise known as Manhattan's Upper East Side - has its own rigid code of behaviour. Emotional displays - unacceptable. Fun - no thanks. This is Glenn Wilder-Bingham's kingdom. A beautifully displayed impeccably edited fortress of restraint. So when Rosie Kitto, an eccentric 38-year-old primary school teacher from England, bounces into their lives with a secret sorrow and a heart as big as the city, nobody realises that she hasn't read the rule book. For the Wilder-Bingham family, whose lives begin to unravel thread by thread, the consequences are explosive. Because after a lifetime of saying no, what happens when everyone decides to start saying...yes?
Sixteen-year-old Lottie O'Brien dreams of escaping the poverty that has plagued her family, but when she befriends teacher Madeleine Carson and her wealthy family, Lottie's life is rapidly transformed, but not how she expected.
Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world, until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts.
At the end of her rope, Codi Noline returns to her Arizona home to face her ailing father, with whom she has a difficult, distant relationship. There she meets handsome Apache trainman Loyd Peregrina, who tells her, "If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
Beginning with the return to Venice of an old and sick man determined to confront his past, and accompanied by his daughter who is escaping hers, The Antipodeans spans three generations of a New Zealand family and their interaction with three families of Northern Italy. From Venice to the South Island of New Zealand, from the assassination of a Gestapo commander in the last days of Italian resistance in WWII to contemporary real estate shenanigans in Auckland, from political assassination in the darkest days of the Red Brigade to the vaulting cosmology of particle physics, The Antipodeans is a novel of epic proportions where families from the opposite ends of the earth discover an intergenerational legacy of love and blood and betrayal.
An epic saga of the upstairs and downstairs residents of an English country house which spans some 240 years and includes the stories of its original architect, a Victorian family that shared four decades of family history, soldiers billeted in the house during World War I, and a young couple who restores the house in the 1950s.
Aurora Pettigrew has a loving family, a nice home, a comfortable life. She's waiting for the right man to offer marriage and the man for her is Reid Sinclair, heir to the Sinclair fortune. But, Reid's mother is against the match and unearths a secret that will tear Aurora's world apart. Unwilling to bring shame on her family and needing answers, Aurora moves to York. By chance, she reconnects with a man from her past and before he leaves with the army to war in South Africa, he offers her security through marriage. Aurora knows she should be happy, but the memory of her love for Reid threatens her future. When tragedy strikes, can Aurora find the strength to accept her life and forget the past?
The houses in Saffron Lane are being filled with artists thanks to the efforts of Nell and Angus. Ginger doesn't win a place there, but gets a job running the small cafe/art gallery, taking refuge there from her abusive bully of a son. When she meets Iain, sparks fly between them, the first time she's felt attracted to anyone for years. But will her son spoil it? Emil is in town to open the small museum in Saffron Lane and run his father's business. This throws new opportunities in his path, and new problems too. Will the newcomers manage to build new lives or will selfish people destroy their attempts to find happiness?
In a small rural community north-west of Sydney, park ranger Cal Nyx finds a badly decomposed body in the bush. The remains are identified as someone she once knew, and the police are now treating her as a suspect. Determined to prove her innocence, Cal embarks upon a hunt for the real killer - but when it turns out the victim was wanted in relation to a previous murder, the case takes a complicated turn. With family issues bubbling away in the background, Cal starts to feel the heat. Then the police start probing into her private life, and she finds herself in a race against the clock to solve the crime. But the murderer has Cal in their sights, and she must make a choice -- catch a killer, or do right by her family?
London, 1926. Two baby girls are born just hours and miles apart. One you know as the Queen of England, but what of the other girl - the daughter of an undertaker named in her honour? Betsy Sunshine grows up surrounded by death in war-torn London, watching her community grieve for their loved ones whilst dealing with her own teenage troubles... namely her promiscuous sister Margie. As Betsy grows older we see how the country changes through her eyes, and along the way we discover the birth of a secret that threatens to tear her family apart.
Haunted by their past, the Skelf women are hoping for a quieter life. But running both a funeral directors' and a private investigation business means trouble is never far away, and when a car crashes into the open grave at a funeral that matriarch Dorothy is conducting, she can't help looking into the dead driver's shadowy life. While Dorothy uncovers a dark truth at the heart of Edinburgh society, her daughter Jenny and granddaughter Hannah have their own struggles. Jenny's ex-husband Craig is making plans that could shatter the Skelf women's lives, and the increasingly obsessive Hannah has formed a friendship with an elderly professor that is fast turning deadly.
The Hall family live under the brooding shadow of the Black Mountains, in the mining town of Hillsbridge. Charlotte, James and their seven children are independent spirits, united by strong family values. Living in a mining community is never easy, and when the shadow of impending war threatens, they must pull together to face the hardship to come. Can this close-knit family overcome whatever tragedy life throws at them?
The village is called Mount of Zeal. It's built in a bowl like an amphitheater, with the winding gear where the stage would be. The pit lies below. Ted Howker's school is on the edge of Lower Terrace next to the chapel. Upper Terrace--in a thunderous echo of the Bible so loved by Ted's grandfather--is Paradise. Ted, his father, and his brothers live in Middle. In the beginning: a household of men, all of whom work in the pit.
Siem Sigerius is a beloved, brilliant professor of mathematics with a promising future in politics. His family -- including a loving wife, two gorgeous, intelligent stepdaughters, and a successful future son-in-law -- and carefully appointed home in the bucolic countryside complete the portrait of a comfortable, morally upright household. But there are elements of Siem's past that threaten to upend the peace and stability that he has achieved, and when he stumbles upon a deception that's painfully close to home, things begin to fall apart. A cataclysmic explosion in a fireworks factory, the advent of internet pornography, and the reappearance of a discarded, dangerous son all play a terrible role in the spectacular fragmentation of the Sigerius clan.
When a hunting accident leaves his son in a coma, the son's veterinarian father tries to find the man responsible while maintaining normalcy for his family. Then an unexpected visitor asks a favor that will test his resolve and force him to come to terms with what it truly means to be a family.
When a hunting accident leaves his son in a coma, the son's veterinarian father tries to find the man responsible while maintaining normalcy for his family until an unexpected visitor asks a favor that will test his resolve and force him to come to terms with what it truly means to be a family.
Life is full of terrible things. In 1987, Sue Bowl's world changes for ever. Her mother dies, leaving her feeling like she's lost a vital part of herself. And then her father shacks up with an awful maneater called Ivana. But Sue's mother always told her to make the most of what she's got - and what she's got is a love of writing and some eccentric relatives. So Sue moves to her Aunt Coral's crumbling ancestral home, where she fully intends to write a book ... and perhaps drink Campari for breakfast.
Cornwall, 1793. As the French Revolution threatens the stability of England, so too is discontent brewing in the heart of Celia Cavendish. Promised to the brutal Viscount Vallenforth, she must find a way to break free from the bounds of a life stifled by convention and cruelty. Celia enlists her neighbours, Sir James and Lady Polcarrow, in the hope of escaping her impending marriage and making a new life for herself. But can the Polcarrows' mysterious friend Arnaud, captain of the cutter L'Aigrette, protect Celia from a man who will let nothing stand in the way of his greed? And will Arnaud himself prove to be friend... or foe?
The Scottish Highlands, 1899. A life altering event led Catrina Davies to hide from her family and society. But Travis Millard, the man she used to love, finds her and she agrees to marry him and to return to her family estate, Davmoor Court in Yorkshire. But while her father clings to life, Davmoor is nearly ruined by her brother's gambling obsession. As Catrina adjusts to her regained position in society, her marriage comes under attack from Travis's grandmother, who has her own reason for loathing the family. When one of her brother's adversaries stakes his claim on the estate, the resulting chaos threatens the people she loves the most.
