Family Drama-Rama -- It's National Family Story Month

Just in the nick of time, you can still celebrate November’s National Family Drama Month by reading a book about someone else’s family! They say life is stranger than fiction, and sometimes it’s more fun to delve into the lives other families and experience their trials and tribulations, their joys and sorrows, and the crazy situations that families find themselves navigating. If you like to read stories about families, take a look at these gripping family sagas – and don’t let the early publication dates scare you away. Families were just as dysfunctional back “in the day” as they are today! Be sure to check out the various formats these books come in.



Fiction:

Eden Close by Anita Shreve (1998, c1989) - A "measured and haunting" modern gothic tale of one man's attempt to uncover the obsessions that killed a neighbor and blinded a beautiful girl seventeen years earlier. (excerpt from Bibliocommons)

Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler (1995) – Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace or reason. But for Delia, who feels like a tiny gnat buzzing around her family's edges, "walking away from it all" is not a premeditated act but an impulse that will lead her into a new, exciting, and unimagined life. (excerpt from Bibliocommons)

And the Mountains Echoed by Kahled Hosseini (2013) - A novel about how people love, how they take care of each other, and how choices made today can resonate through future generations. Author Khaled Hosseini gives listeners a multi-generational family story revolving around siblings and how they love, betray, hurt, honor, and would do anything for one another. (excerpt from Bibliocommons)

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998) - The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it-from garden seeds to Scripture-is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. (excerpt from Bibliocommons)

The Shell Seekers by Rosamude Pilcher (1987) - Set in London and Cornwall from World War II to present, The Shell Seekers tells the story of the Keeling family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The family centers around Penelope, and it is her love, courage, and sense of values that determine the course of all their lives. (excerpt from Bibliocommons)

Non-Fiction:

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (2011) - The incredible true account of Kamila Sidiqi who, when her father and brother were forced to flee Kabul, became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own and held her family together. (excerpt from Bibliocommons)

The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz - The Way We Never Were examines two centuries of American family life and shatters a series of myths and half-truths that burden modern families. Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, Coontz sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice. (excerpt from Bibliocommons)

Downloadable Audio Book: 

Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy (2009) - Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born. (excerpt from Bibliocommons)

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