Winner of the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award "Gorgeously tender at its core…beautiful, heartstopping…Family Life really blazes." —Sonali Deraniyagala, New York Times Book Review Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation). In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision. We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.

This book captures the essence of modern family life. Much has changed since our own childhoods; the good old days. Todays parents are challenged by the need to invent their own parenting style. This can only happen from within, based on our personal values and boundaries. Jesper Juul puts it very clearly: The love we feel for our children and our partners does not in itself have any value. It has no value at all until it is converted into loving behavior. Each chapter focuses on the values that form a solid platform on which to build a family: Equal dignity, Integrity, Authenticity and Responsibility. This makes family life more meaningful and parents avoid living frantically from conflict to conflict, desperately searching for quick solutions and trying to adapt to the most popular parenting technique of the day. A book full of everyday examples and practical ideas.

Revised and featuring a new foreword by the author, this uncompromising novel returns, more powerful than ever: "A portrait of a country ravaged by vendetta and graft, its public spaces loud with the complaints of religious bigots and its private spaces cradling unspeakable pain." (Hilary Mantel, New York Review of Books) An Obedient Father introduced one of the most admired voices in contemporary fiction. Set in Delhi in the 1990s, it tells the story of an inept bureaucrat enmired in corruption, and of the daughter who alone knows the true depth of his crimes. Decried in India for its frank treatment of child abuse, the novel was widely praised elsewhere for its compassion, and for a plot that mingled the domestic with the political, tragedy with farce. Yet, as Akhil Sharma writes in his foreword to this new edition, he was haunted by what he considered shortcomings within the book: almost twenty years later, he returned to face them. Here is the result, a leaner, surer version with even greater power.

"Cute and familiar." - Kirkus From New York Times Best-Selling illustrator, Kathryn Durst, and Penguin Workshop editors and authors, Renee Hooker and Karl Jones, comes a tale of a young girl who imagines her family as a pandemonium of parrots, a swarm of bees, a smack of jellyfish, a wisdom of wombats, and more! When a young girl gets frustrated with her chaotic life at home, she imagines what things would be like if her family were animals instead. Would life be better as a pod of pelicans, a pride of lions, or a herd of buffalo? Or is it ultimately a family of humans that she needs? In this beautifully illustrated book, young readers learn the names for groups of animals through a sweet, whimsical narrative that focuses on the importance of family.

Named a Best Book of 2015 by Chicago Book Review! Meet the Brunsons of Downers Grove, Illinois. Henry is the once-magical father, whose fear of aging and endangered career lead him to the nightclubs of Chicago's Viagra Triangle. His wife Julie struggles to reclaim her life with a bottle of Zoloft and dreams of her youthful independence. Charlie, the golden-boy son, leaves the lucrative job his father arranged to serve in Afghanistan—and returns angry, damaged and uncertain of his place in the world. And Barkley, the bumbling youngest, is an aspiring writer of geeky science fiction stories now interviewing for his first job at a forbidding Catholic high school. When Henry's health abruptly declines, he tries to return to the home and the life he had dominated. But his family, once totally dependent on his love, physical strength, and income, no longer needs him. As Julie, Charlie, and Barkley begin to find their ways forward, Henry tries desperately to bring them back together. In the end, each one will arrive at a new understanding of what family can—and cannot—be. Unusually assured and perceptive, combining narrative drive with humor, insight, and powerful family dynamics, A Good Family is a memorable debut by former high school teacher Erik Fassnacht.

A humorous, warm memoir of family life in the countryside from bestselling author, Clare Mackintosh. 'Insightful, funny, absorbing' Prue Leith 'Original yet totally recognisable' Katie Fforde 'Sheer bliss!' Jill Mansell 'Heartfelt and poignant' Sunday Express I have always loved the Cotswolds. I think I loved them even before I found them, in that half-formed ideal one has of where to put down roots. Somewhere peaceful, green, where the road meanders between drystone walls and from town to town, and a strip of blue bursts from brook to river and back again. For 8 years, Clare Mackintosh wrote for Cotswold Life about the ups and downs of life with a young family in the countryside. In this memoir she brings together all of those stories - and more - for the first time. From keeping chickens to getting the WI drunk, longing for an Aga to dealing with nits, Clare opens the door to family life with warmth and humour and heart.

"This is Claude. He's five years old, the youngest of five brothers. He also loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess.When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl. Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They're just not sure they're ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude's secret. Until one day it explodes."--