People don’t just disappear without a trace... Shelby Tebow is the first to go missing. Not long after, Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, vanish just blocks away from where Shelby was last seen, striking fear into their once-peaceful community.
Are these incidents connected? After an elusive search that yields more questions than answers, the case eventually goes cold. Now, eleven years later, Delilah shockingly returns.
Everyone wants to know what happened to her, but no one is prepared for what they’ll find. Mary Kubica’s novel Local Woman Missing takes domestic secrets to a whole new level.
The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways, they have never been farther apart.
Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily could not have less in common.
Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family’s orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts’ influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.
French Braid by Anne Tyler is a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present.
In the Summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first-time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory.
Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass, only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city.
Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected. As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis.
One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition.
Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother’s mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger and that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush. Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time.
Memphis, by Tara M. Stringfellow, paints an unforgettable portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.