Showing titles in Family Life

Amid a series of personal disasters, Aliyah and her daughter, Sakina, retreat to rural NSW to make a new life. Aliyah manages to secure a run-down property and hires a farmhand, Shep, an extremely private Palestinian man and the region's imam. During a storm, she drives past the town's river and happens upon a childhood friend, Hana, who has been living a life of desperation. Aliyah takes her in and tries to navigate the indefinable relationships between both Hana and her farmhand. Tensions rise as Aliyah's devotion to Hana is strained by her growing bond with Shep.

I've known Death a long time but now Death knows me. When their idyllic childhood is shattered by the sudden death of their parents, siblings Marty, Liz and Jules are sent to a bleak state boarding school. Once there, the orphans' lives change tracks: Marty throws himself into academic life; Liz is drawn to dark forms of escapism; and Jules transforms from a vivacious child to a withdrawn teenager.

Privacy is hard to maintain in Badara, the kind of small Australian country town where everyone knows everyone else's business. So discovers single mum Paige when she and her three children arrive from the city seeking refuge. Paige's only respite from child care and loneliness is the Tuesday gym club, where she had feared the judgement of the town matriarchs, but she is met only with generosity and a plethora of baked goods. Besides, both the brusque Marion and her polished sister-in-law Briony are too busy dealing with their own dramas to examine hers.

Christmas may be the season of goodwill and festive cheer, but not for the poor of 1950s Liverpool. And for St Angelus Hospital in Lovely Lane, it is frantically busy. There are the old, the dying, the children and the emergencies.

The nurses, known locally as the Angels of Lovely Lane, are run off their feet. Dana, Beth, Pammy and Victoria hardly have time to catch their breath, let alone have a Christmas of their own.

After thirty-five years as the Chief of Police on Nantucket, Ed Kapenash's heart can no longer take the stress. But his plans to retire are thwarted when, with only three days left on the job, he receives a phone call. The Richardsons' 22-million-dollar summer home has been burned to the ground. The couple are far from hurt - they were out on the water at one of their lavish yacht parties. But their dependable personal assistant has vanished. To solve the case, the Chief will have to contend with small town gossip for one final act of service to the community he knows and loves.

Every murder case starts with a suspect. What if the suspect is your daughter? Would you believe her, or the evidence against her? The father believes his daughter has been framed.The mother believes she is hiding something. The daughter believes they have no idea what she’s truly capable of.... There are three sides to the story. And the truth will shatter this family to pieces.

Ria and Marilyn have never met - they live thousands of miles apart, separated by the Atlantic Ocean: one in a big, warm, Victorian house in Tara Road, Dublin, the other in a modern, open-plan house in New England. Two more unlikely friends would be hard to find: Ria's life revolves around her family and friends, while Marilyn's reserve is born of grief. But when each needs a place to escape to, a house exchange seems the ideal solution.

Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam play a married couple who met in the Summer of Love and have stayed together ever since. Children of the '60s, they are still free spirits, drawn together by their love for music and one another. We follow their conversations from the café to the kitchen table, taking in everyday chores, dealing with problems with long-held friendships and tackling their frustrations with each other.

Marianne Clifford, 15, only child of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, Lal, falls helplessly and absolutely for Simon Hurst, 18, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents. But fate intervenes. Simon's plans are blown off course, and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together. Narrating her own story, characterising herself as ignorant and unworthy, Marianne's telling use of irony and smart thinking gradually suggest to us that she has underestimated her own worth.

Baumgartner's life has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna. But now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence. Rich with compassion, wit and Auster's keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient episodes of ordinary life, Baumgartner is a tender late masterpiece of the ache of memory. It asks: why do we find such meaning in certain moments, and forget others?

In the snowy market town of Wetherly, Merry is about to take on her biggest project yet, the arrival of a new baby. She has always dreamed of being a mother, particularly as she lost her own mother at such a young age. Everyone is so excited, so why is Merry feeling terrified? And why is she struggling to open up to business partner and best friend Nell, whose help she needs at the thriving candle shop more than ever?

On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother's past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga - Greece's former leper colony.

With compassion, humor, and striking insight, Amy and Isabelle explores the secrets of sexuality that jeopardize the love between a mother and her daughter. Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student in a small mill town, falls in love with her math teacher, and together they cross the line between understandable fantasy and disturbing reality. When discovered, this emotional and physical trespass brings disgrace to Amy's mother, Isabelle, and intensifies the shame she feels about her own past.

Olivia fled her abusive marriage to return to her hometown and take over the family beekeeping business when her son was six. Now Asher is more than six feet tall and in his last year of high school, a kind, good-looking, popular ice hockey star with a tiny sprite of a new girlfriend whom Olivia loves. Then Lily is found with a catastrophic head injury at the bottom of the stairs—and Asher is arrested on a charge of murder. What was the truth of their relationship?

The Last Kingdom is one of the most successful historical fiction series of our time, telling the epic story of the birth of England, and introducing one of the greatest ever fictional heroes: the iconic Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Saxon-born, Norse-raised, warrior and rebel. The final Last Kingdom book was published in 2020, but for the author the story felt unfinished: there were some Uhtred tales he still wanted to tell, and over the course of writing the books he'd become fascinated by some elements of the Anglo-Saxon world that it wasn't possible to fully explore in the novels.

After the death of her husband, Adam, in an horrific plane crash, Gemma Sinclair defies community expectations—and Adam's dying words—by deciding to hang on to Billbinya, the 10,000-hectare station he bequeathed to her. As if Gemma's grief and the job of looking after Billbinya aren't enough, a wave of innuendo soon sweeps the community that Adam's plane crash was no accident. Police officers confirm the rumour when they visit Gemma and tell her Adam's death was almost certainly related to his involvement in a cattle and sheep duffing ring.

Precious Ramotswe, traditionally-built proprietor of Botswana's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, contemplates the two sorts of problems that we all face in life: the major ones (such as drought), about which very little can be done, and the other sort which people make for themselves through human weakness and an inability to resist temptation. Like the inability to resist cake, for instance.

Allergic to group activities of any kind, all her life Serenata has run, swum and cycled on her lonesome. But now that she's hit 60, all that physical activity has destroyed her knees. As she contemplates surgery with dread, her previously sedentary husband, Remington, recently and ignominiously redundant, chooses this precise moment to discover exercise. Which should be good for his health, right? Yet as he joins the cult of fitness that seems increasingly to consume the whole of the Western world, her once-modest husband burgeons into an unbearable narcissist.

Audrey Lamont has happily devoted herself to family life for the best part of 40 years, but lately she's become aware that she lost herself somewhere between 'I do' and the weekly shop. Worse, her academic husband Simon has found time for romance–just not with Audrey. Feeling invisible to everyone, even herself, she flees to her aunt's home in rural France. While waiting for her sudden absence to spark a change of heart in Simon, Audrey finds solace in the charms of the French countryside and the company of her aged aunt and a cast of eccentric Bretons.

Sleep deprived, struggling and at breaking point, first-time mum Gracie Michaels books one night - alone - at The Maxwell Hotel. A king-size bed all to herself. No demands. With time to recharge she'll be able to return to her family more like the unflappable mother she pretends to be. Instead, she wakes in a room she doesn't recognise after an encounter with a man who is not her husband. Then she sees something she wishes she hadn't.