"Paris, 1958: Rose, a seamstress at a fashionable atelier, has been entrusted with sewing a Grace Kelly-look-alike gown for a wealthy bride-to-be. But when, against better judgment, she finds herself falling in love with the bride's handsome brother, Rose must make an impossible choice, one that could put all she's worked for at risk: love, security and of course, the dress. Sixty years later, tech CEO Rachel, who goes by the childhood nickname "Rocky," has inherited the dress for her upcoming wedding in New York City. But there's just one problem: Rocky doesn't want to wear it. A family heirloom dating back to the 1950s, the dress just isn't her. Rocky knows this admission will break her mother Joan's heart. But what she doesn't know is why Joan insists on the dress - or the heartbreaking secret that changed her mother's life decades before, as she herself prepared to wear it. As the lives of these three women come together in surprising ways, the revelation of the dress's history collides with long-buried family heartaches. And in the lead-up to Rocky's wedding, they'll have to confront the past before they can embrace the beautiful possibilities of the future."--Publisher description

In the perfect family, there's a thin line between love and hate, especially when there's so much to hide. The Keelers are one of those families that seem to have everything. Glamorous, wealthy and privileged, life has always been easy for them, on the outside at least. But even the happiest of families have their secrets.

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.

"Zoltan Beck is dying. His devoted but long-suffering sons, Ben and Frank, are trying to prepare themselves and their families for Zoltan's eventual departure...but they can't quite bring themselves to believe that the end is really at hand, and neither can Zoltan himself. The head of a family marked by war and tragedy for decades, he "can't stand to be in a room with a miserable person" and has done his best to keep the pain of his refugee past from his beloved children. But as he faces the end of his life, he discovers a heartbreaking secret from the War that will ultimately bring the family together - or irrevocably disrupt it. Set in both mid-20th century Hungary and contemporary Toronto, this is a deeply moving novel that revels in the energy of its extraordinary characters. It is the story of lost love and newfound connections, of a father and his sons desperately reaching out to bridge an ever-widening gap...even as their time together ebbs away."--Provided by publisher.

"A novel about the life-changing journey of a young man who travels from New Jersey to Khrushchev's Russia and the beaches of Southern France as he finds love and discovers the long-hidden secrets about his heritage." --

"Coming of age in 1960s Paris, Bernard Appelbaum exists in the hazy shadow of the Holocaust and on the electric cusp of the French New Wave. We find the narrator of Wide awake as he wanders the city streets in search of signs of his father, who was deported by the Nazis in 1942. Bernard's chance encounter with a former acquaintance who has become filmmaker François Truffaut's assistant leads to a spot as an extra on the set of Jules and Jim--setting into motion a series of discoveries and lost memories that crack open a hidden past. On seeing Jules and Jim, Bernard's mother is moved to divulge the secrets of her own past as a Jewish-Polish immigrant to France, which curiously mirrors that of the film's heroine. When revelations about his mother's two loves lead Bernard on a fateful journey through Paris, to Germany, and then to Auschwitz itself, he must plumb haunting depths in order to recover his own identity."--Publisher's description.

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?