Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Recalling the past at her daughters' request, Lara tells the story of a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance, which causes her daughters to examine their own lives and reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Author
Language
English
Description
"Stifled by tragedy, thirteen-year-old Grace Mockingbird yearns to escape her mother's controlling, grieving hand and find her voice in a small Kentucky coal mining town. A tragic family loss has driven a wedge between Grace and her mother, who seems to be silently punishing Grace by withholding her love. Grace does penance in every chore while doubting she'll ever earn her mother's forgiveness. But change arrives with the hot winds of summer as the...
Author
Series
Amgash novels volume 1
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lay the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"The New York Times bestselling author of Falling presents a warm, wise, and wonderfully vivid novel about a mother who asks her three estranged daughters to come home to help her end her life. Ronni Sunshine left London for Hollywood to become a beautiful, charismatic star of the silver screen. But at home, she was a narcissistic, disinterested mother who alienated her three daughters. As soon as possible, tomboy Nell fled her mother's overbearing...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"T. Kingfisher's A House With Good Bones is a contemporary Southern Gothic from a master of modern horror that explores the deep, dark roots of family and in which grandma's ghost haunting your house may be the least of your worries. In this ordinary North Carolina suburb, family secrets are always in bloom. Samantha Montgomery pulls into the driveway of her family home to find a massive black vulture perched on the mailbox, staring at the house....
Author
Language
English
Description
Motherhood is tough. But then, so is daughterhood. When we first meet Claire, she's living in Sedona, Arizona with her boyfriend Cal and ducking calls from her mother. Her mom is a world class psychic on the East Coast and Claire doesn't want her to discover the truth. Claire works in the family business and calls herself a psychic, but she doesn't really have "the gift" and hasn't for a long time. She's a fraud. Meanwhile, on the other side of the...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War comes a novel set during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, telling the story of a family reborn through loss and love.
In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone streets. Into this bustling town, came Pauline Bright and her husband, filled with...
In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone streets. Into this bustling town, came Pauline Bright and her husband, filled with...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family, about a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for--and everything she feared. Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting, supportive mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood's exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter--Violet...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A poignant, darkly funny debut novel about a young woman who travels--penniless, pregnant, and homeless--to her deceased mother's small southern hometown, and becomes embroiled in a local mystery: what forced her mother to flee that town thirty-five years previously?"--
"From a bright new talent comes this debut novel about a young woman who travels for the first time to her mother's hometown, and gets sucked into the mystery that changed her family...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Charlotte has everything in life that she ever could have hoped for: a doting, artistic husband, a small-but-thriving flower shop, and her sweet, smart five-year-old daughter, Daisy. Her relationship with her mother might be strained, but the distance between them helps. And her younger brother Rocco may have horrible taste in women, but when he introduces his new girlfriend to Charlotte and her family, they are cautiously optimistic that she could...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Tilly was a bright, outgoing little girl who liked playing with ghosts and matches. She loved fizzy drinks, swear words, fish fingers and Catholic churches, but most of all she loved living in Brighton in Queenie Malone's magnificent Paradise Hotel with its endearing and loving family of misfits - staff and guests alike. But Tilly's childhood was shattered when her mother sent her away from the only home she'd ever loved to boarding school with little...
13) Bridge
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"Twenty-four-year-old Bridge is paralyzed by choices: all the other lives she could have lived, the decisions she could have made. And now, who she should be in the wake of her mother's unexpected death. Jo was a maverick neuroscientist fixated on an artifact she called the "dreamworm" that she believed could open the doors to other worlds. It was part of Jo's grand delusion, her sickness, and it cost her everything, including her relationship with...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.1 - AR Pts: 21
Language
English
Description
"Alice Metcalf was a devoted mother, loving wife, and accomplished scientist who studied grief among elephants. Yet it's been a decade since she disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind her small daughter, husband, and the animals to which she devoted her life. All signs point to abandonment . . . or worse. Still Jenna--now thirteen years old and truly orphaned by a father maddened by grief--steadfastly refuses to believe in her...
Author
Series
Big Stone Gap novels volume 3
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Description
To unify her family, Ave Maria must harness the power of love and its abiding truth in this lyrical and heartfelt novel, the third installment of the New York Times bestselling Big Stone Gap series
“Trigiani can make you laugh in one sentence then break your heart in the next.”—Mississippi Clarion-Ledger
Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney has never been a devotee of tarot cards or...
“Trigiani can make you laugh in one sentence then break your heart in the next.”—Mississippi Clarion-Ledger
Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney has never been a devotee of tarot cards or...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A "novel about a young African-American woman coming of age... Raised in Pennsylvania, Zinzi Clemmons's heroine Thandi views the world of her mother's childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor - someone,...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
Feeling empty in spite of the wealth that affords her a luxurious Manhattan apartment, designer accessories, and fine art, Catherine West pursues a relationship with the son of a family friend who her Alzheimer's patient mother only remembers negatively.
Author
Series
Amgash novels volume 2
Language
English
Description
From #1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout comes a brilliant latticework of fiction that recalls Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity. Written in tandem with My Name Is Lucy Barton and drawing on the small-town characters evoked there, these pages reverberate with the themes of love, loss, and hope that have drawn millions of readers to Strout's work."As I was writing My Name Is Lucy...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
A small town's beloved family. A shocking, senseless crime--and the dark secret at the heart of it all. Everyone in Ashford, Cornwall, knows Meg Nichols and her daughter, Grace. Meg has been selflessly caring for Grace for years, and Grace--smiling and optimistic in spite of her many illnesses--adores her mother. So when Meg is found brutally bludgeoned in her bed and her daughter missing, the community is rocked. Meg had lived in terror of her abusive,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Popular advice columnist Wendy Wise has been skillfully advising the women who write to her seeking help for four decades, so why are her own daughters lives such a mess? Clementine, the working mother of a six-year-old boy, has just discovered that she is actually renting the Queens home that she thought she owned, because her husband Steve secretly funneled their money into his flailing start-up. Meanwhile, her sister Barb has overextended herself...
Interlibrary Loan Request
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Des Moines Public Library can be requested from other libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? If the item was published recently, submit a purchase suggestion. Submit Request