On the verge of death for the umpteenth time, Anna makes a shocking confession to her grown children: an affair from her past that just might have resonance beyond the family. But how much of what she says is true? While her children try to separate fact from fiction, Anna fights for a legacy she can be proud of. With razor-sharp wit and extraordinary insight, OUR MOTHER'S BRIEF AFFAIR considers the sweeping, surprising impact of indiscretions both large and small.

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

September 1940. England is at war and London has become an ever-fragile place for widowed Livia Ripley and her two young daughters, Polly and Eliza. When Livia meets charismatic publisher Hugo Ballantyne, she is hopeful that her life is about to change for the better. But as clouds gather in the autumn sky, the wail of the siren heralds the arrival of the Luftwaffe. Livia volunteers to be a warden and finds the reality and despair of war a contrast to the comfort of the Balfour Hotel with Hugo. Livia soon discovers a strength she never knew she had, which gives her the power to save those she loves.

'Incredibly moving' --Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize An Affair with My Mother by Caitriona Palmer: a moving and gripping story of love, denial and a daughter's quest for the truth. Caitriona Palmer had a happy childhood in Dublin, raised by loving adoptive parents. But when she was in her late twenties, she realized that she had a strong need to know the woman who had given birth to her. She was able to locate her birth mother, Sarah, and they developed a strong attachment. But Sarah set one painful condition to this joyous new relationship: she wished to keep it - to keep Caitriona - secret from her family, from her friends, from everyone. Who was Sarah, and why did she want to preserve a decades-old secret? An Affair with My Mother tells the story of Caitriona's quest to answer these questions, and of the intense, furtive 'affair' she and her mother conducted in carefully chosen locations around Dublin. By turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, An Affair with My Mother is a searing portrait of the social and familial forces that left Sarah - and so many other unwed Irish mothers of her generation - frightened, traumatized and bereft. It is also a beautifully written account of a remarkable relationship. 'Caitriona Palmer has called out the false shame of her origins, with a kind of anguished courage that is incredibly moving. An Affair With My Mother is a forensic account of how it feels to be - in the interests of Catholic "respectability" - excluded from the facts of your own life. In its commitment to family love, to joy and truth, it is a gift.' Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize

Underground and Zippy the Pinhead cartoonist Bill Griffith uncovers his mother’s hidden past in his first graphic memoir. This is the renowned cartoonist's first long-form graphic work ― a 200-page memoir that poignantly recounts his mother’s secret life, which included an affair with a cartoonist and crime novelist in the 1950s and ’60s. Invisible Ink unfolds like a detective story, alternating between past and present, as Griffith recreates the quotidian habits of suburban Levittown and the professional and cultural life of mid-century Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s as seen through his mother’s and his own then-teenage eyes. Griffith puts the pieces together and reveals a mother he never knew.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.