The history of Brazil from 1500 to the present told by daughters down the matrilineal line.

The first in an epic two-book saga, this sweeping story explores the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters as each woman is forced to confront her faulty but well-meaning desire to help her daughter find her God-given place in the world. "Ambitious, strong-willed Marta Schneider leaves her home in rural Switzerland at the beginning of the 20th century. She's determined to flee her abusive father, loving but weak mother, and the constraints placed on women. Meeting interesting characters all along her journey, she works her way to Canada. There she buys a boardinghouse and meets her match in Niclas Waltert, a German engineer with a farmer's heart. Through Marta's sharp elbows and the sweat of Niclas's brow, the family eventually arrives at an increasingly comfortable life in California's Central Valley. The second half of the story is told from the point of view of constitutionally timid daughter Hildemara Rose."--Publishers Weekly.

1980: Josephine escapes her home in Ireland, hoping never to return. She starts a new, exciting life in London, but as much as she tries, she can't quite leave the trauma of her childhood behind. Seventeen years and two children later, Josephine gets a call from her sister to tell her that their mother is dying and wants to see her - a summons she can't refuse. 1997: Ten-year-old Clare is counting down to the summer holidays, when she is going to meet her grandparents in Ireland for the first time. She hopes this trip will be 'just what the doctor ordered' and cheer her mum up. But family secrets can't stay buried forever and following revelations in Ireland Josephine and her family unravel, perhaps to the point of no return.

Famed feminist Marilyn French’s life-affirming saga celebrates the love and sacrifices of four generations of Polish-American mothers and daughters. With Bella Dabrowski close to death, her daughter Anastasia, who has reinvented herself as Stacey Stevens, is trying to penetrate the longstanding barriers between them to understand the woman who gave her life. Through the eyes of Stacey, a divorced, feminist New York photographer, we get to know Bella, a remarkable woman, wife, and mother. The daughter of Polish immigrants, Bella, who renamed herself Belle, clawed her way out of poverty and settled into a middle-class existence. Shifting perspectives between the two women, the reader is drawn into Belle’s life through the lean years of the Depression as well as Stacey’s recollections of her youthful marriage, a lesbian affair, and her tempestuous relationship with her own daughter, Arden. From the groundbreaking author of The Women’s Room, Her Mother’s Daughter explores past and present to reveal the complex, indestructible bonds between daughters and mothers.

On a hot July night on Cape Cod, at the age of 14, Brodeur became a confidante to her mother's affair with her husband's closest friend. Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help, but when the affair had calamitous consequences for everyone involved, Brodeau was driven into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. In her memoir she examines how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. -- adapted from jacket

A rich and luminous novel about three generations of women in one family: the love they share, the dreams they refuse to surrender, and the secrets they hold Samantha is lost in the joys of new motherhood—the softness of her eight-month-old daughter's skin, the lovely weight of her child in her arms—but in trading her artistic dreams to care for her child, Sam worries she's lost something of herself. And she is still mourning another loss: her mother, Iris, died just one year ago. When a box of Iris's belongings arrives on Sam's doorstep, she discovers links to pieces of her family history but is puzzled by much of the information the box contains. She learns that her grandmother Violet left New York City as an eleven-year-old girl, traveling by herself to the Midwest in search of a better life. But what was Violet's real reason for leaving? And how could she have made that trip alone at such a tender age? In confronting secrets from her family's past, Sam comes to terms with deep secrets from her own. Moving back and forth in time between the stories of Sam, Violet, and Iris, Mothers and Daughters is the spellbinding tale of three remarkable women connected across a century by the complex wonder of motherhood. This book was later published under the title Mercy Train.

The daughter of esteemed writer Paula Fox and the mother of Courtney Love relates “the curse of the first-born daughter” that has haunted four generations of her family As an adopted child, Linda Carroll created a magical world of her own, made up of dramatic adventures and the abiding fantasy that her real mother would come and take her away. When she finds herself pregnant at the age of eighteen, she is determined to have the perfect understanding with her child that she lacked with her adoptive mother. But readers will know better, for that baby grows up to be Courtney Love, desperately attention-seeking, deeply troubled, and one of the most talented women in rock. Even as a baby, Courtney is beset by mood swings that no doctor can explain or cure. Her dark moods and paranoia escalate as she grows up, driving mother and daughter apart. When Courtney has a daughter of her own, Linda finally decides to find her own biological mother, and end the estrangement of generations of first-born daughters. Her Mother’s Daughter is Linda Carroll’s story of self-discovery as an adopted daughter, a childlike hippie mother, and a woman determined to find herself before finding her roots. Set apart from the typical celebrity memoir by Carroll’s gifted storytelling, Her Mother’s Daughter gives a fresh perspective on the elusive yet enduring connections between mothers and daughters, and reveals the true history of the wildly confabulatory Courtney Love.