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At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Cyril's son Danny and his older sister Maeve are exiled from...

"On a day that begins like any other, Hal receives a mysterious letter bequeathing her a substantial inheritance. She realizes very quickly that the letter was sent to the wrong person -- but also that the cold-reading skills she's honed as a tarot card reader might help her claim the money. Soon, Hal finds herself at the funeral of the deceased ... where it dawns on her that there is something very, very wrong about this strange situation and the...

In the tradition of Mary Karr's "The Liars' Club" and Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shouting," Jeannette Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming memoir about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric, and severely misguided family. The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors...

A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.

In Her Shoes observes two sisters, Rose and Maggie, the brain and the beauty, as they make journeys of discovery. Along the way, they borrow each others clothes, boyfriends, and make peace with their most intimate enemies-each other.

Hoping that if she wins a local beauty pageant her father will come home, Raymie practices twirling a baton and performing good deeds as she is drawn into an unlikely friendship with a drama queen and a saboteur.

Some of the stormy weather of the past few seasons seems to have finally lifted for the Quinns. After a year apart, Mitzi has returned to rule the roost; Patrick is about to be released from prison; Kevin has a successful new business and is finally ready to tie the knot with Isabelle; and best of all, there's hopeful news about Bart, who has been captured by enemy forces in Afghanistan. That doesn't mean there aren't a few dark clouds on the horizon....

The Dunnes have set off on a ten day boat trip, a trip that hopefully will bring them closer together, despite the fact that the father, Stuart is staying behind on land. But only an hour into the trip they're already falling apart. The teenage daughter plans to drown herself, and the teenage boy is high on drugs. Ten-year-old Ernie is near catatonic. But their mother Anne, with the help of her brother-in-law Jeff, is insistent on pulling everyone...

The complicated lives and relationships of the Fisher family, owners and operators of an independant funeral home.

"Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who is beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is about to be impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life carefully negotiating her parents' conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. As she grows into...