Why is there a gap in Jules’s baby album? A wry and poignant coming-of-age novel about finding the truth in lies, salvaging hope in heartbreak, and making peace with missing pieces. Eighteen-year-old Jules has always wished for a close-knit family. She never knew her father, and her ex-addict mother has always seemed more interested in artistic endeavors than in bonding with her only daughter. Jules’s life and future look as flat and unchanging as her small Illinois town. Then a simple quest to find a baby picture for the senior yearbook leads to an earth-shattering discovery: for most of the first two years of her life, Jules lived in foster care. Reeling from feelings of betrayal and with only the flimsiest of clues, Jules sets out to learn the truth about her past. What she finds is a wonderful family who loved her as their own and hoped to adopt her — including a now-adult foster brother who is overjoyed to see his sister again. But as her feelings for him spiral into a devastating, catastrophic crush — and the divide between Jules and her mother widens — Jules finds herself on the brink of losing everything.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Colorado Book Award As a working mother and poet-lecturer, Camille Dungy’s livelihood depended on travel. She crisscrossed America and beyond with her daughter in tow, history shadowing their steps, always intensely aware of how they were perceived, not just as mother and child but as black women. From the San Francisco of settlers’ dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana, from snow-white Maine to a festive yet threatening bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods, Dungy finds fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, this is an essential guide for a troubled land.

After the loss of her mother, Zarah goes to visit her aunt, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a young child, but she is greeted instead by a young man named Stein, who introduces himself as her aunt’s son. He seems aggressive from the start, his cold smile no comfort. It turns out that Zarah’s aunt has passed away and left her a huge inheritance. Though it’s a complete surprise to her, Stein believes Zarah is nothing more than a gold digger. Her intention had only been to uncover the mystery of her birth, but the condition of the inheritance states that she must live in her aunt’s house for six months before she can claim her legacy. Will she be able to handle red-hot Stein’s icy attitude until then?

Set in the Michigan landscape that Charles Baxter has made his own, these thirteen exquisite stories illuminate the often curious connections of relatives and strangers. "You can't just get a brother off the street," says the narrator of the title story, but indeed he does. In another, a woman tries to elude her lover's voice by spending an entire day without words. A marriage is jostled by the departure of a friend during a snowstorm. Baxter's stories tend to be love stories, but it is love tinged with fear, even danger, where shock, comedy, and love combine in unexpected ways. Book jacket.

An Italian American investigates his family’s mixed religious roots in northern Italy and Sicily in this fascinating memoir. Italian Protestants? Few people seem to have heard of them, but the author’s mother’s immigrant Italian family was Protestant while his father’s were Catholic immigrants from Sicily. On his father’s side, with dozens of aunts, uncles and numerous cousins, Catholic family gatherings were loud, often profane, with drinking, smoking and raucous celebrations of weddings, births, holidays, and other occasions as well as the mystical rituals inherent in the Catholic faith. By contrast, on his mother’s side, family gatherings were small and quiet, with no smoking or drinking; and religion was the core of most family celebrations. But the author had little understanding of the ancient origins of his maternal grandparents’ very different Protestant faith which marked the keen differences between the two sides of the family. Relative Strangers describes the author’s search for the religious roots of his parents’ families in northern Italy and Sicily. He traces the history of the Waldensians, the Protestant sect which began in Lyon, France, in the twelfth century, often suffering persecution, but surviving to this day both in Europe and America.

The McKay family gathers for a week-long holiday at a rambling old house to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Robert and Mary. In recent years only funerals and sudden, severe illnesses have been able to draw them together and as they gather in the splendid rooms of Hunting Manor, their differences are soon uncomfortably apparent. For all their history, their traditions, the connective strands of DNA, they are relative strangers. There are truths unspoken, but the question is: how much truth can a family really stand? The family holiday mushrooms, drawing in sundry relatives both estranged and deranged. The machinations of an appalling, uninvited aunt threaten the holiday - and the family - with irreparable damage. This book will make you question your own family situation. What does it really mean to be 'family'?

Italian Protestants? Few people seem to have heard of them, but the author's mother's immigrant Italian family was Protestant while his father's were Catholic immigrants from Sicily. Relative Strangers describes the author's search for the religious roots of his parents' families in northern Italy and Sicily. He traces the history of the Waldensians, the Protestant sect which began in Lyon, France in the 12th century, often suffering persecution, but surviving to this day both in Europe and America.