In Washington, D.C., life inside the Goldstein home is as tumultuous as the swiftly changing times. In 1979, the Cold War is waning and the age of protest has come and gone, leaving a once radical family to face a new set of challenges. Something Red is a masterly novel that unfurls with suspense, humor, and insight. Dennis, whose government job often takes him to Moscow, struggles both to succeed in a career he doesn't quite believe in and to live up to his father's leftist legacy. Sharon, a caterer for the Washington elite, joins a cultlike group in search of the fulfillment she once felt. Happy-go-lucky Benjamin is heading off to college, there to experience an awakening of social conscience, and sixteen-year-old Vanessa finds a cure for alienation in D.C.'s hardcore music scene. As each of them follows separate trajectories of personal protest and compromise along the edge of a new decade, radical traditions long dormant in their family awaken once again, with shocking, far-reaching results. A poignant story of husbands and wives, parents and children, activists and spies,

The Young family seems to be living the American dream. Willard "Pepper" Young is a successful sales executive who provides amply for his wife, Lily, and children, Gwen and Bud. Bud Young excels both academically and as the quarterback of his high school football team. Tragically, their lives are shattered when Pepper crashes the family station wagon, hurtling Bud into a coma. Equally devastating is the fact that it was Pepper's alcoholism that precipitated the accident. While Lily devotes herself fully to Bud's recovery, younger sister Gwen is bewildered at the course of her family's fate. Bud has overcome athletic and academic obstacles in the past, but he now must face the greatest challenge of his life - recovering from a severe brain injury. Bud's fate depends upon Marcy Ethridge, a tough but caring physical therapist whose strength and knowledge push Bud to the limits of his capabilities over long months of painful recovery. While Marcy achieves small daily victories with Bud, Pepper and Lily grapple with the terrifying prospect that their son will never be the same. This loss is compounded by the months, even years, it will take to gauge the extent of his recuperation. Through it all, Bud leans on Marcy as his therapist. Though at times he calls her his worst enemy, ultimately, she's his greatest friend.

A successful woman in her early forties, Eleanor feels curiously distanced from her beloved husband and children, enthralled by the odd tyranny of her family past, and at the nadir of her self-esteem when she innocently enters into adultery

"Ben Arkin, patriarch of the family, is an artist who has never sold a piece. His children, Sondra, Doris, and Oliver run a record label that has never produced a hit, and that Ben and his wife have bankrolled. When Doris strikes out to form her own label, Sondra sues the entire Arkin family, setting about a series of events that ultimately lead to their demise. The story is told primarily from the perspective of Oliver's daughter, Rebecca, an attorney who might be the only redeeming member of the Arkin family. Rebecca attempts to keep the family from collapsing, while trying desperately to extricate herself from their grasp"--

"In the beginning there was Lucette, who is the mother to three children--Sammy, a gentle giant, almost blind, but a genius with locks; Corinne, a flighty beauty who cannot keep a job; and "the child," an afterthought, who strives to make sense of her fractured Egyptian-Jewish immigrant family. Lucette's children would like a kinder, warmer home, but what they have is a government-issued concrete box, out in the thorns and sand on the outskirts of Tel Aviv; and their mother, hard-worn and hardscrabble, who cleans homes by night and makes school lunches by day. Lucette quarrels with everybody, speaks only Arabic and French, is scared only of snakes, and is as likely to lock her children out as to take in a stray dog. The child recounts her years in Lucette's house, where Israel's wars do not intrude and hold no interest. She puzzles at the mysteries of her home, why her father, a bitter revolutionary, makes only rare appearances. And why her mother rebuffs the kind rabbi whose home she cleans in his desire to adopt her. Always watching, the child comes to fill the holes with conjecture and story. In a masterful accumulation of short, dense scenes, by turns sensual, violent, and darkly humorous, The Sound of Our Steps questions the virtue of a family bound only by necessity, and suggests that displacement may not lead to a better life, but perhaps to art"--

In That's Life, William Herrick's view of humanity is unsparing yet compassionate. He sees life as commitment--to ideals, friends, family--but no one, least of all Herrick, said it was going to be easy. His portraits of the members of a distinctly American family--a novella, five short stories, and a group of five letters--comprise not quite a novel but more than a collection of stories. "I think of it as a co-operative structure," the author says, "in which each character owns and occupies his or her own place, yet it is the entire family which operates the building. To simplify matters, I call the book a fiction." And so we learn the past and present of each of the Millers: Max and Rebecca, Rebecca's mother Ruth (in an old folks' home), and the three Miller children--Eli, an obsessive artist, Peter, an amateur student of life as he bums rides across the country, and teen-ager Nina, a not-so-innocent working-class child away at prep school on a scholarship. But we learn about them in counterpoint and mosaic as Herrick turns our attention, and our allegiance, first to one member of the family and then another. There are few books where human weaknesses are so fully displayed and yet where human endurance and capacity for joy are so palpably present.

It opens with a card game. Played between Jordan's mother and grandmother, the game is called The Mao, and, like the adult world in which he is prematurely thrust, the rules seem arbitrary and the stakes staggeringly high -- whoever wins the game wins custody of him. So begins this 15-year-old child actor's odyssey through the temptations of Hollywood and the emotional minefield of his family's life. As the story unfolds, we learn that Jordan's father has molested him throughout his childhood and that his mother, a narcissistic woman immersed in her acting career, has little interest in him. The only stable force in his life is his grandmother, a remarkable woman with whom Jordan shares everything from dances to drugs to his innermost confidences; a woman who is slowly dying. Heart-wrenching and highly cinematic, The Mao Game sheds light on both the fragile vulnerability and the remarkable resilience of the human spirit. An unmistakably modern coming-of-age story, it marks the triumphant debut of an important new voice in the next generation of American novelists.

Five friends meet weekly at a restaurant called Yellowbird on New York's Upper East Side, revealing the long-hidden secrets of their pasts and how each, in her fashion, has become a survivor beyond all expectations. Texas-born Billie Redmond, the owner of Yellowbird, has come a long way from singing in her daddy's honky-tonk roadhouse. She escapes small town life for the glamour of New York City, where she can be a star like her idol Janis Joplin, and for a brief incandescent moment she lives her dream. But when the hits dry up, so do the high times, and Billie searches her soul to avoid the same fate as her idol. Beautiful, sexy, smart, and black, Felicity Johnson is a successful lawyer whose extramarital affair is part salvation, part invitation to disaster. It will take courage to finally escape from a loveless marriage but, she wonders, does she have the strength to break the self-destructive bond? Kathryn O'Mara Henry comes from a long line of Boston cops, including her hard-drinking father, who terrorizes the family. But one cold night her mother puts a violent end to the nightmare of abuse. From this hell, Kathryn develops into a vivacious and independent woman who finally finds a "good" man who can give her children the stability they need or scar them - and her - for life. Raised in Florida, Eve Bader is a free spirit who dreams of a career on the silver screen. She is so determined to make it as an actress in Hollywood that she forsakes her young daughter, Nicole, for a chance at stardom. Only when she starts a new life with her daughter in New York does she begin to prosper as an actress. But once again, her blind ambition threatens her relationship with her daughter, and friendship within the group. Gara Whiteman has worked hard to become a prominent psychologist, and after resolving her love/hate relationship with her controlling mother and a divorce from her husband of twenty-two years, she takes on the biggest struggle of her life - and is finally open to finding someone to love again. The intimacies from each woman's past and present are brought to the shared table at Yellowbird, where they variously support, amuse, encourage, and betray each other, finally emerging stronger than any of them dared imagine.

Some readers will have already met GP Sue, her daughters Frankie and Lola, her husband Matthew, and their unexpected surprise addition to the family, Tom. In this delightful sequel, we are a year on... Sue is a GP, her busy life filled with demanding but lovable patients, demanding but lovable children, a husband, and a new dog. But she has just enough time to notice the rather gorgeous neighbour who walks his black lab in the park. Frankie is about to do her GCSEs, and is absolutely certain that no-one is as stressed as she is, nor as in love, nor as confused. Lola is eleven, and endearingly aware of those around her, including all her friends (and whether they are, or not), her Granny, her pain-in-the-neck but scrumptious new baby brother, and the fact that her Dad is spending a lot of time texting. And when she sneaks a peek at his calls, there are far too many to someone called Laura. Suddenly, Lola feels overburdened with guilt and responsibility, so just what is she to do? WHAT ABOUT ME, TOO? is a searingly honest account of life in a normal London household, of how perceptive children can be, and how the dismantling of a marriage can be both devasting and liberating at once. 'An uproarious read that will have women everywhere nodding in wry recognition' You Magazine 'Funny, touching and all too familiar' Woman & Home

Jungk gives a profound meditation on a Jewish family and its past, especially the lasting distorting effects on a son of a famous, vital father and a clinging, overwhelming mother, and of the differences between the generation of European intellectual refugees who arrived in the United States during the Second World War and the children of that generation.

"The Splendor of Portugal's four narrators are members of a once well-to-do family whose plantation was lost in the Angolan War of Independence; the matriarch of this unhappiest of clans and her three adult children speak in a nightmarish, obsessive gush to give us the details of their grotesque family life and its consequences. Like a character out of Faulkner's decayed south, the mother clings to the hope that her children will come back, save her from destitution, and restore the family's imagined former glory. The children, for their part, haven't seen each other in years, and in their isolation are tormented by feverish memories of Angola. The vitriol and self-hatred of the characters know no bounds, for they are at once victims and culprits, guilty of atrocities committed in the name of colonialism as well as innumerable humiliations and betrayals of their own kin."--Page 4 of cover.