After chess led to the destruction of her family four years earlier, Mallory Greenleaf's focus is a dead-end job that keeps the lights on for her mother and sisters. When she plays in a charity tournament and wipes the board with current world champion Nolan Sawyer, the victory opens the door to sorely needed cash prizes. Mallory struggles to keep her family separated from the game, but she soon realizes that the games aren't only on the board. The...

"When Annie Brown, a fun-loving woman, suddenly dies, her husband, best friend, and her children all struggle to find ways to go on after the loss of the woman who was the center of their lives, and who made life happy, fun, and secure. Her husband is overwhelmed with four children to raise, and turns to his teenage daughter for help, and to an old girlfriend for solace. Annie's best friend struggles again with opioid addiction, having depended on...

An older couple agree to mind their estranged daughters' boyfriends child, while daughter and boyfriend go on a trip. The boy bonds with the old man in a way his daughter never did. Shows the terrors and graces of aging.

"Wildly different half-sisters Maggie, Simone, and Star have hardly seen each other since their sprightly summers at Rowan Thorp, their eccentric father Augustus's home. Known for the fruitful ways in which his bustling knick-knack shop kept the tired town afloat, Augustus was loved by all and known by none, not even his daughters. Now, years later, the three estranged women are unexpectedly reunited at the reading of Augustus's will. Maggie, Simone,...

"From award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger, a searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them. Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger's family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days...

The misadventures of a family with a home business father and a journalist mother.

Tom and Kate Baker have made many sacrifices in their professional lives in order to raise their 12 children. When Tom is offered a job as a Division I college football coach, he moves the entire pack to a suburb in Chicago. This move shakes up the entire family, but when Kate's memoirs get published, she takes off on a book tour. The lack of parental guidance creates problems for all the Baker kids and chaos ensues.

Moving out does not necessarily mean moving on, as Jason and Maggie discover when Mike and Carol move to the Big Apple together, to be roommates! As that arrangement goes about as swimmingly as the elder Seavers could have predicted, Ben struggles with life lessons about the true rewards of high school vanities, while Chrissy struggles just to get noticed by her busy family.

"The winner of Sweden's most prestigious literary award makes her American debut with an epic, multigenerational poem about a Sámi family's quest to stay together across a century of migration, violence, and colonial schooling"--