Family & Domestic Fiction

Related category

The Book of Longings

A Novel

By Sue Monk Kidd

In first-century Galilee, Ana is a wealthy, intellectually restless young woman determined to write the stories of women whose lives have been neglected or erased. Her ambitions conflict with a family intent on arranging a profitable marriage and with a society that grants women little authority over their work, bodies, or futures. After meeting Jesus of Nazareth, Ana becomes his wife and enters a household far poorer than the one she has known. Their marriage unfolds amid domestic strain, Roman occupation, political resistance, and Jesus’s developing spiritual vocation. Ana’s own path eventually carries her from Sepphoris and Nazareth to Alexandria and a community of Jewish contemplatives. By imagining a fictional wife for Jesus, Sue Monk Kidd shifts attention from familiar sacred history to the contested question of who is permitted to leave a record. The novel treats longing, writing, and female solidarity as forms of resistance against disappearance.

Related category

Beach Read

By Emily Henry

January Andrews retreats to a Lake Michigan beach house after her father’s death leaves her grieving, financially strained, and unable to write the hopeful romances on which her career depends. Her summer becomes more complicated when she discovers that her neighbor is Augustus Everett, a successful literary novelist and former college rival facing his own creative impasse. To break their stalemate, the two agree to exchange fictional territory: Gus will attempt an upbeat novel, while January tackles a darker story. Their competing research trips draw them beyond easy assumptions about each other’s work—and into a relationship neither planned. Beneath its playful writerly premise, Beach Read explores what happens when familiar stories about love, family, and artistic seriousness stop feeling reliable. Emily Henry combines professional rivalry and romantic tension with a reflective account of bereavement, disillusionment, and the difficult choice to remain open to happiness.

Related category

Seven Days in June

A Novel

By Tia Williams

Eva Mercy has built a demanding life in Brooklyn as a successful writer of supernatural erotica and the single mother of a perceptive teenager. Her carefully managed world is disrupted when Shane Hall, an acclaimed and famously private literary novelist, appears at a publishing event. To everyone else, their meeting looks like an introduction. In reality, Eva and Shane shared an intense, formative week as troubled adolescents—and have carried its emotional consequences into adulthood. Their reunion unfolds over seven summer days, while flashbacks reveal the pain, attraction, and desperate coping strategies that first drew them together. As Eva and Shane reconsider what happened between them, the novel asks whether enduring love is enough without honesty, accountability, and recovery. Tia Williams combines a second-chance romance with an exploration of chronic pain, addiction, self-harm, Black literary culture, motherhood, inherited trauma, and the ways writers transform private experi…