When Layla Brennan married her high school sweetheart, Brett Foster, she finally got the big, loving family she’d always wanted: his. Now she’s closer to Brett’s parents than he is, partners with his sister in a successful pet-photography business, and confidant to his younger brother. She couldn’t be more of a Foster if she’d been born one. There’s just one problem: Brett wants a divorce. Stunned and heartbroken, Layla turns to the Fosters for comfort, only to realize that losing Brett means losing them as well. What else can she do but sue him for the most valuable thing he’s got–namely, his family. Breaking up may be hard to do, but for Layla and Brett it’s even harder to undo. Fresh, funny, poignant, and brimming with insight into what makes modern families tick–and what can blow them apart– Family Affair proves that in love and war, everything’s relative.

"The hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from 'a glowing light of modern Italian literature' (New York Times Book Review). At the heart of Happiness As Such is an absence, an abyss that draws everyone nearer to its edge, created by the departure of a family's wayward only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes to him too; so does Mara, his former lover, who gave birth to a child who could be his own. Left to clean up Michele's mess, his family and friends complain and commiserate, making mistakes and missteps, attempting to cope in the only ways that they know how. With a few brushstrokes, Natalia Ginzburg can flesh out an entire existence and all its pitfalls and disappointments with unmatched clarity. One of Natalia Ginzburg's finest achievements, Happiness As Such is an experimental, wise, raw, comic novel, written in powerful prose that cuts to the bone with surgical precision"--

Set largely in the elegant city of Geneva in the mid-1930s, Belle du Seigneur is a terrifying and seductive novel, comic in form and deadly serious in its deflation of the common pieties. Adrian Deume is an aspirant 'B' in the sprawling bureaucracy of the League of Nations, and also the head of the ghastly Deume clan, portrayed in a brilliantly sustained commentary on middle-class manners. Then there is a generous helping of the 'Valiant', a squabbling quintet who stand, in comic invention, somewhere between Baron Munchhausen and the Marx Brothers. These distinct worlds have a common centre: Solal, Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations. A Mediterranean Jew blessed with great gifts and cursed by crippling idealism, he sees all too clearly that international understanding is eternally undermined by personal and national interests. But it is his affair with Ariane Deume that finally precipitates his fall. He rejects the world and attempts to achieve through love the Absolute which he craves. But it is the eternal contradiction that perfection, once achieved, cannot endure, and Cohen leads him to his fate with a unique brand of teasing, clear-eyed pessimism.

When Jo Green takes a nannying job in London to escape her small-town routine, complicated family, and perfect-on-paper boyfriend Shaun, culture shock doesn't even begin to describe it. Dick and Vanessa Fitzgerald are the most incompatible pair since Tom and Jerry, and their children - glittery warrior pixie Cassandra, bloodthirsty Zak and shy little Tallulah - are downright mystifying. Suddenly village life seems terribly appealing. Then, just as Jo's getting the hang of their designer lifestyle, the Fitzgeralds acquire a new lodger and suddenly she's sharing her nanny flat with the distractingly good-looking but inexplicably moody Josh. So when Shaun turns up, things get even trickier... A heartwarming, laugh out loud romantic novel with a fantastically dysfunctional family and complicated love triangle to amuse every reader.

Drama / 2m 3f / Simple SetCome Back Come Back Wherever You Are a play by the widely-acclaimed Tony Award-winning theatre legend Arthur Laurents is an intimate emotional drama about a cabaret singer coping with the devastating death of her husband while trying to navigate her overbearing controlling mother-in-law and the aggressive advances of a sexually persistent handsome new suitor.Recently widowed Sara must comes to terms with her husband's death but is haunted by visions of him. Her fixation on his posthumous messages dampens her historically lukewarm relationship with Marion her therapist mother-in-law who is disturbingly pragmatic about the passing of her son. Sara's grief is also altered by Michelle her under-appreciated sister-in-law who is struggling both with her sexual identity and her relationship to her deceased brother. All is complicated by Dougal a picture framer who is struck by the earnest Sara.Come Back Come Back Wherever You Are is a gripping drama about grief and the ability of a family to cope with loss. But at its heart it is a play about love. It was part of the 2009 season at the George Street Playhouse."The prolific Laurents has given his play a crisp staging cramming the 90-minute wake with enough heartbreak and ardor to fill a grand opera." - Variety

In the year 1930, three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary to the chronicles of our committee and the conclusions of the British policeman, the people of the moshava knew that only two of the suicides had actually taken their own lives, whereas the third suicide had been murdered." This is the contention of Ruta Tavori, a high school teacher and independent thinker in this small farming community, writing seventy years later about that murder and about two charismatic men she loves and is trying to forgive--her grandfather and her husband--and her son, whom she mourns and misses.

"A breathtaking journey across Iran where war and superstition, jealousy and betrayal, and passion and loyalty rage behind the impenetrable walls of mansions and the crumbling houses of the Jewish Quarter. Against the tumultuous background of World War II, Dr. Yaran will find himself caught in the thrall of the anti-Semitic Governor General, the most powerful man in the country. Dr. Yaran falls in love with the Governor General's defiant wife, Velvet, upending not only the life of the doctor's beloved daughter, but the entire community. In his quest to save everything and everyone he loves, Dr. Yaran will navigate the intersections of magic, science, lust, and treachery. His sole ally is the Governor General's servant, an exotic eunuch, who will do anything to aid his mistress in her dangerous quest to attain forbidden love." --

Introduction -- Anthropology of China : history, regionalism and comparison -- Kinship as ideology and as corporation -- Relatedness and gender -- Love, emotion and sentiment -- The exchange of money, gifts and favours -- The localization and globalization of food -- Nature, environment and activism -- Ritual and belief -- Hospitality -- The stranger king and the outside of an imperial civilisation -- The anthropology of the modern state in China -- Conclusion.

From number one bestselling author Santa Montefiore It is 1925 and the war is long over. But much has been lost and life will never truly be the same again. Castle Deverill, cherished home to the Deverill family in the west of Ireland for hundreds of years, has burned to the ground. But young and flighty Celia Deverill is determined to restore the sad ruin to its former glory. Celia married well and has the wealth, after all, to keep it in the family and she cannot bear to see it stand neglected. But dark shadows are gathering once more, as the financial markets start to shake. And everything that felt so certain is thrown once again into doubt. A compelling story of family and history, from the author of the top ten bestseller Songs of Love and War . ***PRAISE FOR SANTA MONTEFIORE*** 'Nobody does epic romance like Santa Montefiore' JOJO MOYES 'An enchanting read, overflowing with deliciously poignant moments' DINAH JEFFERIES 'Santa Montefiore hits the spot for me like few other writers' SARRA MANNING 'One of our personal favourites' The Times 'Accomplished and poetic' Daily Mail 'Santa Montefiore is a marvel' Sunday Express

It is set in the summer of 1931, when twenty-year-old Nora Krieger returns to her small-town home in Lithuania from university in Berlin ready to present her new, mature self. Instead, her time at home becomes a period of unrequited love, difficult memories and introspection. Hopeful that her long wallks and intellectual banter with Albert Arin will lead to romance. Nora must abandon the notion when she discovers Arin's affair with his daughter's friend. Determined to come to terms with her relationship with her father, who was driven to madness after being tortured in the First World War, Nora must confront her own fear of losing her sanity. Young, educated and Jewish, she must accept the limits imposed on her by a class-conscious, increasingly anti-Semitic society.

In the run up to Christmas, three families are placed into cramped temporary accommodation. A middle-aged man and his elderly mum, a young family with a baby on the way, a newly arrived woman from Sudan. Strangers. Forced together. No space is personal. In this play by Alexander Zeldin, written through a devising process, the audience are invited to bear witness to an intimate story of family love for our times. Love received its world premiere at the National Theatre, London, in the Dorfman Theatre, on 6 December 2016.

Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the Depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remake American culture, but slowly suffocates his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black American musicians, only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge, and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another.

Watching her Russian immigrant mother, Irina, struggle to put food on the table, Nina, a beautiful and restless teenager, vows her life will be different. When a strapping older man in a fancy car appears at school one day offering her luxuries her single mother cannot afford, Nina believes he's her ticket out of her dumpy little town. Ignoring the danger signs and her mother's constant pleas, which end in exhausting screaming matches, she packs a suitcase and leaves home after one last fight. Ten days later, a terrified Nina, her dress torn, is hiding in the stairwell of a Tel Aviv apartment after witnessing a murder she cannot talk about. She is discovered by one of the building's tenants, a confused, lonely old widow who mistakes her for the granddaughter she hasn't seen for a long while, not since her son moved his family to America. "You've come back to me, Dana'le." Instead of correcting the mistake, the desperate Nina jumps at the chance for a place to hide. Hiding from her mother and the dangerous man who are both frantically searching for her, Nina settles into the old woman's apartment. But how long can Nina possibly hide out until the poor woman realizes she's not who she says she is, or before someone else, her homesick son in America who keeps calling, or the lovely local neighbors who drop by with groceries, catches on?

S. Bear Bergman is an acclaimed writer and lecturer who travels regularly across North America to speak on trans issues. Bear's first two books, Butch Is a Noun and The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You , are considered seminal texts on the subject of trans life. In his third essay collection, Bear enters, describes, and rearranges our ideas about family as a daughter, husband, father, and friend. In Bear's extended family "orchard," drag sisters, sperm-donor's parents, Sparkles and other relations provide more branches of love, support, and sustenance than a simple family tree. Defiantly queer yet full of tenderness and hilarity, Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitter is a beautifully thought-provoking book that redefines the notion of what family is and can be.

Raised without a father, Jana McPartland did not want the same for her unborn baby. So when the daddy-to-be took a hike, she turned to her closest friend, Sam Harrison. He'd always been her refuge from the storm...and this was one heck of a hurricane she'd found herself in. The bestselling novelist offered her a roof over her head, a paycheck for her hard work and all the safety she craved. Yet Jana found herself needing more from the brooding bachelor--to finally give in to the unspoken attraction that had always burned between them. But as a former foster kid, Sam wasn't the type of man who stepped out of his comfort zone. Until he proposed!

A beautifully written, sensual and evocative book, in the tradition of Amy Tan and Isabelle Allende, rich in magic realism and folklore. 'To understand the end you have to look for the beginning'. As a little girl in Jaffa, Israel, Tamara has an insatiable desire for stories, constantly asking questions of those around her, and demanding explanations. However, no-one ever seems to give Tamara the whole story, so instead she must piece together the various narratives herself in what will become a lifelong attempt to unravel the hidden secrets of her tangled family history, and so bring some meaning to her own life. Raised by her fiercely independent maternal grandmother, Simcha, who jealously guards her from others, in particular her paternal grandmother, Rashella, Tamara's love of stories develops into a voracious appetite for life itself. An impulsive, passionate seeker of knowledge in all its forms, nothing prepares her for the thrilling intensity and the danger of falling deeply, madly in love for the first time