"When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition ... Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is [their center of gravity] Jude, ... by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body...

"Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family's peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado--the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses. Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, unknowingly igniting as much passion...

"People expect big things from Alexis Montgomery. She's a thirty-seven-year-old doctor from a wealthy and prestigious family full of world-renowned surgeons. Only, Alexis is tired of living up to her family's dreams for her. Now she's about to take her bravest step yet: start living her life for herself. Daniel Grant is a twenty-eight-year-old small-town carpenter with a heart of gold and a legacy of his own. He may not have gone to college, but he's...

Sophia Alexander, the beautiful daughter of a famous surgeon in Berlin, has had to grow up faster than most young women. When her mother falls ill, Sophia must take charge of her younger sister, Theresa, and look after her father and the household, while also volunteering at his hospital after school. Meanwhile, Hitler's rise to power and the violence in her very own town have Sophia concerned, but only her mother is willing to share her fears openly....

From the Publisher: After more than two years on the bestseller lists, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel of enormous contemporary relevance. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years -- from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding -- that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate,...

When Alma Sofia Esperanza Jose Pura Candela asks her father why she has so many names, she hears the story of her name and learns about her grandparents.

"The novel begins with the character of Ethan, a lawyer living in New York City who tells us the story of his family's life just as they learn his father - a textile manufacturer who spent long trips throughout Asia - has fathered a secret family from a woman he met on one of his trips and set up in a house in Queens. From here, we move to different related characters as the novel expands outward to the woman, her sons, a few surprise relations, some...

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Cyril's son Danny and his older sister Maeve are exiled from...

Introduces different types of households and discusses families with children, adoption, foster parents, same-sex parents, and fertility treatments.

"After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin, Noemi Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. Noemi is an unlikely rescuer : She's a glamorous debutante, more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough, smart, and not afraid : not of her cousin's new English husband, a stranger who is both menacing and alluring ; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems fascinated...