Showing results for "The Happy Family" in Literature & Fiction

Minnie and Bert are over the moon to have their three grown-up children home for the first time in a decade. But having Lizzie, Jess, Owen and the grandchildren under one roof isn’t without its dramas. Lizzie is off the alcohol (although emergency gin doesn’t count), Jess is juggling a toddler and a newborn, but it’s Owen who has the power to throw a grenade into everything.

Amy is 34 and has just given up her glittering career in the big (Welsh) city to move back in with her grandfather, returning to work in the small-town Chinese takeaway where she spent her bookish and boring childhood. Why? That's a secret she won't tell. Just like the secret of why her grandfather, Ah Goong, and her father, TC Li, haven't spoken to each other in 30 years. Weirder still, they've lived in the same small flat about the takeaway for the majority of those years, with Amy's mother, Joan, acting as their unfortunate go-between and buffer.

Why Mummy Swears is the much anticipated new novel from Gill Sims, author of the hilarious Why Mummy Drinks and online sensation Peter and Jane. It’s every parents’ nightmare - the start of the school holidays - and instead of sitting in the sun, reading a book over a cold, crisp glass of Pinot Grigio, Mummy has two bored moppets to attend to. After frantically booking sports camps, child minder slots, not to mention time off work, Mummy is exhausted. But this is only the beginning....

Die Wünschmanns sind nicht happy. Mama Emmas Buchhandlung geht pleite, Papa Frank ist völlig überarbeitet, die pubertierende Fee bleibt sitzen, und Sohnemann Max wird von dem Mädchen, das er liebt, ins Schulklo getunkt. Kein Wunder also, dass sich jeder mit jedem streitet. Und als ob das alles noch nicht genügen würde, werden die Wünschmanns auch noch von einer Hexe verzaubert: Plötzlich sind sie Vampir, Frankensteins Monster, Mumie und Werwolf. Tja, niemand hat behauptet, dass es einfach ist, als Familie das Glück zu finden.

John Moffatt and Rosemary Leach star in this BBC Radio 4 production of Noël Coward’s patriotic play about the ups and downs of a working-class family between 1919 and 1939. This Happy Breed opens in 1919, when the Gibbons family have just moved to their smart new home in the suburbs of South London. Against a background of social change and national upheaval spanning twenty years, the family celebrate their own triumphs and deal with their personal traumas.

When Rita McCall discovers her husband’s affair, there isn’t a lick of surprise—not a single tear or broken heart. Just a wife and mother who’s over it and ready to watch her twenty-three-year marriage go up in flames. Sticking close, thick as thieves since childhood, Rita’s unfailingly loyal cousins Jemel and Sharae become her lifeline. They stand beside her as she contemplates a new career and navigates the murky waters of being a preacher’s daughter disgraced by scandal.

Marnie MacGraw and Patrick Delaney have been in love for a few years now, enough to realize that they are imperfectly perfect together. Still, there are some things that maybe need a little attention. Marnie’s ebullient; he’s brooding. She thrives on change; he prefers stability. She sees marriage and parenthood in their future, but he can’t see beyond the shadow of an earlier tragedy. Then an eight-year-old surprise from Patrick’s past shows up on their doorstep, cartwheeling into their lives and spinning things in all directions.

After her former band shot to superstardom without her, Claire reluctantly agrees to a gig as a playgroup musician for wealthy infants on New York's Park Avenue. Claire is surprised to discover that she is smitten with her new employers, a welcoming clique of wellness addicts with impossibly shiny hair, who whirl from juice cleanse to overpriced miracle vitamins to spin class with limitless energy.

Asta Fung is sixteen and sulky. Her parents have moved the whole family to take over the Yau Sum takeaway in another town so Grandpa Charlie can be closer to the big hospital. She's had to give up her dog, her friends, her familiar teenage life. All too soon, she has to give up Grandpa Charlie too. What was the point? When the builder's son, Josh, hands her a bundle of love letters he found under the floorboards, Asta realises they were hidden there by Grandpa Charlie as a young man.

Banking, Beer & Robert The Bruce is a fictional novel depicting two slowly entwining families from Irish/Scottish and English descent in a humorous and real-life way. Mixing bawdy British humor and American-style action-adventure, this is good old fashioned story-telling at its best.

Allele Island is a beachcomber's paradise for a charming little primate named Eena Beena, who tends her stretch of beach - and the hapless castaways who wash up there - as if it were her own private garden. Everything changes when a deranged ape named Prospero arrives with plans to kidnap the island's queen for an evil experiment that threatens the world.

The first Philadelphia Fringe Festival podcast play The Many Men of Martha Manning is a giddy spoof of the classic radio soap operas of the 40s and 50s. This six-episode "StereoSonic Adventure" takes the plucky 1958 housewife from Pepper Pickle, Pennsylvania, on a wild ride around the world in search of the truth about her missing scientist husband, Bill. She's accompanied by her incomprehensible best friend, Dotty.