"In this haunting new novel, the act of forgetting is as strange and interesting as the power of remembering." —The New York Times Book Review Look out for Penelope Lively’s new book, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories. Penelope Lively is renowned for her signature combination of silken storytelling and nuanced human insights. In Family Album, lively masterfully peels back one family's perfect façade to reveal the unsettling truths. All Alison ever wanted was to provide her six children with a blissful childhood. Its creation, however, became an obsession that involved Ingrid, the family au pair. As adults, Paul, Gina, Sandra, Katie, Roger, and Clare return to their family home and as mysteries begin to unravel, each must confront how the consequences of long-held secrets have shaped their lives.

This warm, perceptive, and dryly humorous romance novel from the acclaimed Isla Dewar is a wonderful, richly textured story focusing on several generations of one family through a year in their lives.

Obsessively neat Lily, a writer who writes about writers, is asked to interview the enigmatic Rita Boothe, journalist, photographer, self-styled culinary expert and wit. Sitting in Rita's living room, leafing through a book of photographs from the early seventies, Lily comes across a picture of an incandescently sexy young woman sitting in the back of a limousine swigging Jack Daniels. It is her mother, Mattie. Lily isn't shocked. She's envious. She wants to be like that--beautiful, exuberant. Mattie, though, is no longer the meltingly gorgeous creature she was. She and her husband scrape by and bicker. Upstairs in their neglected house, Grandpa flirts on the Internet. Marie, Lily's sister, is facing a custody suit. Rory, the brother, hates coming home--those endless catch-up conversations. Usually it is Lily, the dutiful daughter, who sorts out the family. She knows she's flawed, but boringly so. Now she wants to be flawed in an interesting way, to be a woman of wicked mystery and intrigue. Like the one in the photograph. SECRETS OF A FAMILY ALBUM is a beautifully written novel that explores the struggles and triumphs of one extraordinary family.

A new edition with a new introduction and an additional chapter.

For years, James Edward Phillips kept his wife and children in the dark. All through the time in the tall stone house on the corner of Howard Road, through the nights of the Blitz and the summer holidays at Brean, he let everyone think that he had never known his parents and that any brothers and sisters he night have had were lost without trace. On the few occasions when he made some reference to his early life, he spoke as though he had emerged into history at the age of six when someone in London had packed his belongings in a little wooden box and put him on a train to Bristol. When Louie's father dies, she discovers that she didn't know him at all. Suddenly people are appearing claiming to be relatives - people Louie and her sister had never heard of, people who knew their father very well indeed. What was her father's secret? How could anyone have a hidden life for decade after decade? As Louie researches the gas-lit streets of Victorian London to find out the truth about her father's family, she takes the scant facts she can gather and imagines what really happens into a story of her own. Though as she keeps asking questions, she discovers that her father was not the only one in the family with secrets to keepa What Louie creates is a vivid story of two pampered daughters fallen on hard times, of better instincts corrupted by exhaustion and petty revenge, of cold-blooded calculation, of passion, and of rending betrayals of the most bitter kind.

White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing is the story of Gail Lukasik’s mother’s “passing,” Gail’s struggle with the shame of her mother’s choice, and her subsequent journey of self-discovery and redemption. In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother’s decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother’s fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother’s racial lineage, tracing her family back to eighteenth-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage. With a foreword written by Kenyatta Berry, host of PBS's Genealogy Roadshow, this unique and fascinating story of coming to terms with oneself breaks down barriers.