domestic fiction

After Lulu and Merry's mother is killed in a drunken rage by their father, who is sent to prison, they become orphans and are sent to a terrifying group home where they cling to each other for support, but thirty years later, the girls have yet to come to terms with the events and each has a different view of their incarcerated father.

Seventeen-year-old Lark, living with her aunt in West Virginia after the death of her father in the Korean War and her mother's abandonment, struggles to understand her family's past and create a future for herself and her disabled brother, Termite.

Dominick Pindle's life takes a dangerous turn the summer of his sixteenth year when he becomes involved with his father's mistress and his mother dies in a motel room after trying to abort a pregnancy that resulted from her affair with the local sheriff.

The camaraderie of four mothers is tested when social cliques create trouble for the friendship between their middle-school-age daughters.

Naomi, widowed eight years earlier, is faced with loss again when her adult son is killed in an automobile accident, and decides to move from New England to her hometown in South Carolina, accompanied by her daughter-in-law Ruth, where both are welcomed into a large and loving family that helps them deal with their grief.

Scout Finch, the young daughter of a local attorney in the Deep South during the 1930s, tells of her father's defense of an African-American man charged with the rape of a white girl.

A teenaged Nigerian girl and her older brother struggle to cope with life in their tense, stifling household--caused by their father's demands for perfection--after getting a taste of freedom during a visit to their aunt's home.

Presents Jane Austen's first published novel about two sisters of different temperaments whose bad luck in love brings them to a closer understanding of each other, and includes other writings from Austen's time, providing context; modern essays on topics related to the novel; and works of early and modern criticism.

Tells the story of two sisters: Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a child-wife living in the South, in the medium of their letters to each other and in Celie's case, the desperate letters she begins, "Dear God.".

Siddalee Walker, a successful theater director, is thrown into a void of uncertainty when she has a falling out with her mother, Vivi, over a New York Times article in which Vivi is characterized as an abusive parent, and the Ya-Yas, Vivi's gang of lifelong girlfriends, conspire to restore the mother-daughter relationship.