Showing results for "Bliss" in Family Life

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave? Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her.

Pretty, unworldly Sophia is twenty-one years old and hastily married to a young painter called Charles. An artist's model with an eccentric collection of pets, she is ill-equipped to cope with the bohemian London of the 1930s, where poverty, babies (however much loved) and her husband conspire to torment her. Hoping to add some spice to her life, Sophia takes up with Peregrine, a dismal, ageing critic, and comes to regret her marriage - and her affair.

In 1966, Sook-Yin is exiled from Kowloon to London with orders to restore honour to her family. As she strives to fit into a world that does not understand her, she realises that survival will mean carving out a destiny of her own. Thirty years later, in London, her daughter Lily can barely remember the mother she lost as a small child. But when she is unexpectedly named in the will of a powerful Chinese stranger, she embarks on a secret pilgrimage to Hong Kong to discover the lost side of her identity and claim the reward.

Grace Adams is one bad day away from saving her life. One hot summer day, stuck in traffic on her way to pick up the cake for her daughter's sixteenth birthday party, Grace Adams snaps. She doesn't scream or break something or cry or curl into a ball. She simply abandons her car in traffic and walks away. But not from her life—towards it. To the daughter who won't live with her anymore and has banned her from the party. To the husband divorcing her. Towards the terrible thing that has blown their family apart.

There’s no problem Professor Chandra can’t solve. Except for one: the secret to happiness. In the moments after the accident, Professor Chandra doesn’t see his life flash before his eyes, but his life’s work. He’s just narrowly missed the Nobel Prize (again) and even though he knows he should get straight back to his pie charts, his doctor has other ideas. All this work. All this success. All this stress. It’s killing him. He needs to take a break, start enjoying himself.

On the battlefields of the Crimea, William Gale cradles the still-warm body of his brother. William's experience of war will bring about a change in him that will reverberate through his family over the next two centuries. In the 1970s, William's descendants invite Stephen, a distant relation, to stay in their house in the English countryside—but their golden summer entanglements will end in a shocking fall from grace. Half a century later, a confrontation between the surviving members of the family will culminate in a terrible reckoning.

Chrissie has always wanted to be a mother. After months of trying to adopt, she and her husband Stuart finally get the news that a little girl named Sunshine is waiting for them. The child comes to them without a history, and it feels like a fresh start for all of them. But when fragments from Sunshine's previous life start to intrude on her new one, the little girl's mysterious past quickly becomes Chrissie's greatest fear.

Two years after her husband's death, kindergarten teacher Brooklyn Harvey is leaving Hope Springs for her in-laws' vineyard in Italy - with no plans of coming back. That is, until she meets a disarmingly sexy biker-turned-chocolatier. He might be the man of her dreams, but he's also the father of one of her students; as such, he's strictly off-limits.

Growing up with an alcoholic single mother, Chloe has seen her share of heartbreak and disappointment, and is striving to build a new legacy for herself. After graduating from college, she takes a job working as a summer girl for the Reeds - a wealthy, accomplished family that personifies her American dream. Her summer takes an unexpected turn when the Reeds' eldest son, Tyler, the star quarterback for Notre Dame, shows up and turns her life upside down.

Investigating the death of her best friend, uptight accountant, Julie Tilling, discovers a world of adult nightclubs and Internet intrigue. When shock jock Damon Corey rocks her world in a wild night of lust, she wonders if she's found love...or the key to solving a murder.

Twenty years after the event that changed her life, Lisette is still haunted by the memory of Lacey Lockhart, the college student shot and killed in 1999 by her ex-boyfriend. As Lisette moves forward to take on new relationships and responsibilities, she looks for role models to navigate the promising world she now inhabits. But will Lisette's journey to find her purpose in life be deeper and harder than she thought? Will she have the courage to be the hero of her own story?