When Heather goes to playgroup, at first she feels bad because she has two mothers and no father, but then she learns that there are lots of different kinds of families and the most important thing is that all the people love each other.

"Sophie Beckett never dreamed she'd be able to sneak into Lady Bridgerton's famed masquerade ball-or that "Prince Charming" would be waiting there for her! Though the daughter of an earl, Sophie has been relegated to the role of servant by her disdainful stepmother. But now, spinning in the strong arms of the debonair and devastatingly handsome Benedict Bridgerton, she feels like royalty. Alas, she knows all enchantments must end when the clock strikes midnight. Ever since that magical night, a radiant vision in silver has blinded Benedict to the attractions of any other-except, perhaps, this alluring and oddly familiar beauty dressed in housemaid's garb whom he feels compelled to rescue from a most disagreeable situation. He has sworn to find and wed his mystery miss, but this breathtaking maid makes him weak with wanting her. Yet, if he offers her his heart, will Benedict sacrifice his only chance for a fairy-tale love" -- Front jacket flap.

A hilarious and ultimately moving memoir of one couple's reliance on complaining, co-dependence, and a healthy supply of Pinot Noir to keep their marriage and sanity intact.

"You need to bribe someone into giving you weed? Don't worry, just step into this court room and call the defendant a murderer. You're a rich, lonely man and you want the joy of company? Don't worry, just buy up people's birthdays, and you'll have friends calling every day. You need to get girls into bed? Don't worry, you know a writer you can strong-arm into writing you a very persuasive story. You're stood on the edge of a very high building, with all of your wretched sorrows? Don't worry, fly already! In these 22 short stories, absurdity leaks out of the cracks in the everyday, wild capers reveal painful emotional truths, and the bizarre is just another name for the familiar. Wickedly funny and thrillingly smart, Fly, Already is a collage of the surrealism of life, written by veteran commentator on the circus farce that is the heart."--Provided by publisher.

Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. He forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.

Twenty-nine-year-old widower Doug Parker finds his life spiraling out of control as he struggles to come to terms with grief, love, family, and suburbia while dealing with a bossy, pregnant twin sister who urges him to begin dating again, a younger sister planning her wedding, a mother dealing with her ailing husband, and a hostile teenage stepson.

"Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother's last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: "Eat me." This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions, both practical and emotional. Of practical concern, his dead mother is six-foot-two and weighs about four hundred and fifty pounds. Even divided up between Seventh and his eleven brothers, that's a lot of red meat. Plus Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan, First hated her, and Sixth is dead. To make matters worse, even if he can wrangle his brothers together for a feast, the Can-Am people have assimilated, and the only living Cannibal who knows how to perform the ancient ritual is their Uncle Ishmael, whose erratic understanding of their traditions leads to conflict. Seventh struggles with his mother's deathbed request. He never loved her, but the sense of guilt and responsibility he feels--to her and to his people and to his "unique cultural heritage"--is overwhelming. His mother always taught him he was a link in a chain, thousands of people long, stretching back hundreds of years. But, as his brother First says, he's getting tired of chains. Irreverent and written with Auslander's incomparable humor, Mother for Dinner is an exploration of legacy, assimilation, the things we owe our families, and the things we owe ourselves"--

A crucial guide to life before—and after—Tinder, IVF, and robots. What will happen to our notions of marriage and parenthood as reproductive technologies increasingly allow for newfangled ways of creating babies? What will happen to our understanding of gender as medical advances enable individuals to transition from one set of sexual characteristics to another, or to remain happily perched in between? What will happen to love and sex and romance as our relationships migrate from the real world to the Internet? Can people fall in love with robots? Will they? In short, what will happen to our most basic notions of humanity as we entangle our lives and emotions with the machines we have created? In Work Mate Marry Love , Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex. Now, as we enter an era of artificial intelligence and robots, how will our deepest feelings and attachments evolve? In the past, the prevailing modes of production produced a world dominated by heterosexual, mostly-monogamous, two-parent families. In the future, however, these patterns are almost certain to be reshaped, creating entirely new norms for sex and romance, and for the construction of families and the raising of children. Steering clear of both techno-euphoria and alarmism, Spar offers a bold and inclusive vision of how our lives might be changed for the better.

Everyone knows Dr. Ruth as the most famous and trusted sex therapist, but few people know she narrowly escaped death from the Holocaust, was raised in an orphanage in Switzerland, or that she was a sniper during Israel's War of Independence. After years spent as a student in Paris, Dr. Ruth came to America dreaming of a new life though never expecting the dramatic turns that would take place. And at the age of eighty-seven, she is as spirited as ever. Through intimate and funny stories, Dr. Ruth sheds light on how she's learned to live a life filled with joie de vivre. And she shows readers how they too can learn to deal with tragedy and loss, challenges and success, all while nourishing an intellectual and emotional spark, and, above all, having fun! Hilarious, inspiring, and profound, The Doctor Is In will change the way you think about life and love, in all their limitless possibilities.

An unforgettable novel of mothers and daughters, wives and muses, secrets and outright lies 'Freud is a modern literary rarity: a born storyteller' THE TIMES 'Such a powerful book' RICHARD CURTIS'Delivers an emotional punch that left me in tears' RACHEL JOYCE'Utterly compelling' HANNAH ROTHSCHILD 'I couldn't love it more' POLLY SAMSON 'I loved this book' AMANDA CRAIG 'Completely, inspiringly wonderful' BARBARA TRAPIDO 'Breathtakingly beautiful' JULIET NICOLSON AN EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF 2021 Rosaleen is still a teenager, in the early Sixties, when she meets the famous sculptor Felix Lichtman. Felix is dangerous, bohemian, everything she dreamed of in the cold nights at her Catholic boarding school. And at first their life together is glitteringly romantic - drinking in Soho, journeying to Marseilles. But it's not long before Rosaleen finds herself fearfully, unexpectedly alone. Desperate, she seeks help from the only source she knows, the local priest, and is directed across the sea to Ireland on a journey that will seal her fate. Kate lives in Nineties London, stumbling through her unhappy marriage. But something has begun to stir in her. Close to breaking point, she sets off on a journey of her own, not knowing what she hopes to find. Aoife sits at her husband's bedside as he lies dying, and tells him the story of their marriage. But there is a crucial part of the story missing and time is running out. Aoife needs to know: what became of Rosaleen? Spanning three generations of women, I Couldn't Love You More is an unforgettable novel about love, motherhood, secrets and betrayal - and how only the truth can set us free.

A volume of essays evaluates how modern-world circumstances, from gay adoption and absent fathers to open marriages and green-card marriages are changing the domestic scene today, in an anthology that includes contributions by such figures as ZZ Packer, Dan Savage, and Min Jin Lee. 20,000 first printing.

Shakuntala is a young Indian woman who returns to post-Independence Delhi from Oxford University. Sketching a gallery of fascinating and distinctive characters against a rich background, she draws the contrast between two very different families and their daily lives - their squabbles, their politics, their love affairs, their expectations. She brings to life the nostalgic Englishman Esmond Stillwood, also the beautiful Gulab and her son Ravi, the elderly Uma, and Shakuntala's family and the neighbours Ram Nath and Lakshmi. A master of both the comic and the serious, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has constructed a richly ripe Indian comedy of manners. She strips bare that certain section of affluent Indian society which is particularly vulnerable to the seductions of an imperial presence, and brilliantly and wittily crystallizes some of the confusions that bedevilled India at the dawn of Independence.

"The story of an Iranian man reckoning with his capacity for love and evil"--

Nearly everywhere and at all times, marriage has enjoyed a privileged status as the primary social unit—the essential bond that created alliances between families and a bridge between the sexes. In joining a man and woman, marriage attempted to hold men to collective social standards, including responsibility for the women they impregnated and the children they fathered, while also stringently hedging in women’s sexuality. In short, marriage has always demanded that both men and women sacrifice a considerable measure of individual freedom. In marriage, “I” becomes “we,” and “we” frequently extends beyond the couple to extended family, clan, and society. For these reasons, both political and religious authorities typically have taken great care to present marriage as an institution to which individual interests must be subordinated. At the time of her death in January 2007, the celebrated historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was worried that these attitudes were in the process of being reversed. In this book, which she was in the midst of preparing for publication at the time of her passing, she argues that marriage is disintegrating under the rising demands that it serve not the good of the whole but the desires of the individual. A union that at one point was used to limit individual “rights” is now claimed as one right among many. The sexual liberation movements of the last forty years have seriously undermined marriage, argues Fox-Genovese, so much so that the institution seems to face the threat of extinction. Even so, she writes, “Marriage for love—the promise of an enduring and engulfing bond between a man and a woman—is a dream that refuses to die. . . . It still promises that we will finally be loved as we long to be loved.” That dream is the ultimate theme of this book, a fitting coda to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s distinguished career.

We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family. Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition. Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer Marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after." --inside front cover flap

"As child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin-her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?"--

On a Liverpool railway platform a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year-old illegitimate son for adoption . . . A vicar brings to his bank vault a diary - sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment - that chronicles his longing for other men . . . The one-year-old daughter committed to an institution and barely visited or referred to by her family ever again . . . In Family Secrets Deborah Cohen explores the extraordinary choices British families made in the past to protect their good name. Whether it is hiding an adopted son's origins or the tangled attempts to prevent a divorce, Family Secrets exposes how we dealt with our shame - publicly and in our hearts. 'A book of marvels' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian 'Fact-packed and fascinating' Evening Standard 'Dozens of illuminating stories culled from the divorce-courts, adoption agencies and institutes for the mentally impaired. A find' Judith Flanders, Sunday Telegraph Born into a family with its own fair share of secrets, Deborah Cohen was raised in Kentucky and educated at Harvard and Berkeley.She teaches at Northwestern University, where she holds the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship of the Humanities.Her last book was the award-winning Household Gods , a history of the British love-affair with the home.

"For years, Matthew Greene and Daniel Rosen have enjoyed a quiet domestic life together in Northampton, Massachusetts. Opposites in many ways, they have grown together and made their relationship work. But when they learn that Daniel's twin brother and sister-in-law have been killed in a bombing in Jerusalem, their lives are suddenly, utterly transformed. In dealing with their families and the need to make a decision about who will raise the deceased couple's two children, both Matthew and Daniel are confronted with challenges that strike at the very heart of their relationship. What is Matthew's place in an extended family that does not completely accept him or the commitment he and Daniel have made? How do Daniel's questions about his identity as a Jewish man affect his life as a gay American? Tensions only intensify when they learn that the deceased parents wanted Matthew and Daniel to adopt the children--six-year-old Gal, and baby Noam. The impact this instant new family has on Matthew, Daniel, and their relationship is subtle and heartbreaking, yet not without glimmers of hope. They must learn to reinvent and redefine their bond in profound, sometimes painful ways. What kind of parents can these two men really be? How does a family become strong enough to stay together and endure? And are there limits to honesty or commitment--or love?"--

Irina Davydovna is a cleaner. She has no time for politics or even for that matter, people: 'rules and rulers may come and go, but dirt never changes.' Boris Aleksandrovich is a revolutionary. He thinks he understands power. But this is Leningrad in 1933 and Stalin is about to turn against their city. When the life of his beloved daughter Natasha is threatened and his old friend Anton saves a skinny little orphan he finds on a Moscow train, Boris' faith in his ideals are put to the test. While Irina, watching it all, must learn the power of loyalty and love. 'Powerful and moving, Ice Road is a novel whose epic scope never obscures the individual lives that are lived in the shadow of great events. I shall never forget Natasha and Kolya's love story . . . or Irina, whose sturdy self respect and determination to survive, seems, at times, to speak for an entire people. Gillian Slovo excels in depicting complex human beings, full of passion, love, ambition, self-interest, who are caught up in their country's history and swept along by it.' Pat Barker

Howard Engel has written the perfect parody of a present day Christmas in the suburbs. In his irreverant yet delightfully nostalgic style, Howard Engel tells a story of family, laughter and love. Engel's ear for the rhythm of Thomas' original book combined with his hilarious accounts of uncles, aunts and cousins stuffed into an overcrowded living room, draining the punch bowl and scavenging for presents, brilliantly captures the comic and nostalgic moments of the season.