NCW Libraries

Random circumstances brought them together. Love made them family. Marilyn Fox is three years clean and sober but a life-long loser—in her mind, anyway. It doesn’t matter that she’s finally holding down a job, providing for herself, and trying to make amends with those she’s hurt. Her past haunts her. What kind of mother abandons her own child? No kind, that’s what. She yearns for connection and love but knows that she doesn’t deserve...

"Tessa Jamison couldn't have imagined anything worse than losing her beloved twin girls and husband--until she was convicted of their murder. For ten years, she has counted off the days in Florida's Correctional Center for Women, fully expecting to die behind bars. Fighting to prove her innocence holds little appeal now that her family's gone. But on one extraordinary day, her lawyers announce that Tessa's conviction has been overturned due to a technicality,...

"One phone call is all it takes to lure Mallory Aldiss back to her family's Rhode Island beach home. It's been twenty years since she's been gone - running from the scandal that destroyed her parents' marriage, drove her and her two sisters apart, and crushed her relationship with the love of her life, Jack Sabathian.Twenty years during which she lived in New York, building her career as a photographer and raising her now teenage daughter Joy. But...

"It's the summer of 1959 and the Palace of Versailles is hosting an event that will make history. It is an exclusive dusk-to-dawn ball in which a select group of American and French debutantes will be presented to international society and royalty. Four young women, all with something to prove, receive what some see as the invitation of a lifetime. Amelia Alexander, who hopes to eventually attend law school, hesitates to participate in what she sees...

From childhood, Molly Bell Redwine was taught by her charismatic, domineering mother that "family is everything." But no one warned Molly that family can change unexpectedly. In rapid succession, her husband of more than twenty years abandons her for a younger woman, her mother dies, and her Atlanta clan scatters to the four winds. Molly is set adrift in a heartbeat. With her old world crumbling, Molly takes refuge with a friend on Martha's Vineyard,...

"With empathy, grace, humor, and piercing insight, the author of gods in Alabama pens a powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South that confronts the truth about privilege, family, and the distinctions between perception and reality--the stories we tell ourselves about our origins and who we really are. Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs' weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic...

"A deliciously funny, sharply observed novel of family, wealth, love and tennis, this zeitgeisty debut follows three women in an old Brooklyn Heights clan: one who was born with money, one who married into it, and one, the millennial conscience of the family, who wants to give it all away. Rife with the indulgent pleasures of affluent WASPS in New York and full of recognizable if fallible characters (and a couple of appalling ones!), it's about the...

As the only female firefighter in her Texas firehouse, Cassie Hanswell is excellent at dealing with other people's tragedies. But she never anticipated that her estranged and ailing mother would ask her move to Boston. The tough, old-school Boston firehouse is as different from Cassie's old job as it could possibly be. Hazing, a lack of funding, and poor facilities mean that the firemen aren't exactly thrilled to have a "lady" on the crew, even one...

A man shares a house with his autistic son and cranky elderly father in this "moving, darkly funny novel" (The Washington Post). Ben Jewell has hit a breaking point. His profoundly autistic ten-year-old son, Jonah, has never spoken, and Ben and his wife Emma are struggling to cope. When Ben and Emma fake a separation-a strategic yet ill-advised decision to further Jonah's case in an upcoming tribunal to determine the future of his education-father...

"Atlantic City, 1934. Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to "America's Playground" and move into the apartment above their bakery. The apartment is where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and, despite the cramped quarters, it still feels like home. Now Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again...