Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: family history

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  Half Broke Horses

  A True Life Novel

  by Jeannette Walls

  A story of the free-spirited, wisecracking grandmother of Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle) this novel follows Lily Casey Smith in her fearless, progressive life. It introduces readers to a character so bold as to jump off the page into reality to scold the reader for not realizing the depth of choices in front of them. A woman who could not be corralled, Lily`s stories are rare and will fill many with a... (more)
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  Middlesex

  by Jeffrey Eugenides

  A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides — the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that... (more)
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  The Hare With Amber Eyes

  A Hidden Inheritance

  by Edmund De Waal

  In this family history, de Waal, a potter and curator of ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, describes the experiences of his family, the Ephrussis, during the turmoil of the 20th century. Grain merchants in Odessa, various family members migrated to Vienna and Paris, becoming successful bankers. Secular Jews, they sought assimilation in a period of virulent anti-Semitism. In Paris, Charles Ephrussi... (more)
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  Jellicoe Road

  by Melina Marchetta

  "What do you want from me?" he asks. What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him. More. Abandoned by her mother on Jellicoe Road when she was eleven, Taylor Markham, now seventeen, is finally being confronted with her past. But as the reluctant leader of her boarding school dorm, there isn't a lot of time for introspection. And while Hannah, the closest adult Taylor has to family, has... (more)
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  Tradd Street: Book 2

  The Girl On Legare Street

  by Karen White

  Acclaimed author Karen White returns with the sequel to the national bestseller The House on Tradd Street . Melanie has grown accustomed to renovating old houses, but she never imagined she’d have to renovate her own life to include her estranged mother. Ginnette Prioleau Middleton left Charleston thirty-five years ago. She’s returned wanting to protect the daughter she’s never really known after receiving an... (more)
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  Portrait in Sepia

  by Isabel Allende

  In nineteenth-century Chile, Aurora del Valle suffers a brutal trauma that erases all recollections of the first five years of her life. Raised by her regal and ambitious grandmother Paulina del Valle, Aurora grows up in a privileged environment but is tormented by horrible nightmares. When she is forced to recognize her betrayal at the hands of the man she loves, and to cope with the resulting solitude, she... (more)
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  Ava's Man

  by Rick Bragg

  With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a national bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an... (more)
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  The Monsters of Templeton

  by Lauren Groff

  "The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass." So begins The Monsters of Templeton, a novel spanning two centuries: part a contemporary story of a girl's search for her father, part historical novel, and part ghost story, this spellbinding novel is at its core a tale of how one town holds the secrets of a family. In the wake of a wildly... (more)
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  The Lake of Dreams

  by Kim Edwards

  At a crossroads in her life, Lucy Jarrett returns home from Japan, only to find herself haunted by her father's unresolved death a decade ago. Old longings stirred up by Keegan Fall, a local glass artist who was once her passionate first love, lead her into the unexpected. Late one night, as she paces the hallways of her family's rambling lakeside house, she discovers, locked in a window seat, a collection of... (more)
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  Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times

  by Suzan Colon

  What is the secret to finding hope in hard times? When Suzan Colón was laid off from her dream job at a magazine during the economic downturn of 2008, she needed to cut her budget way, way back, and that meant home cooking. Her mother suggested, “Why don’t you look in Nana’s recipe folder?” In the basement, Suzan found the tattered treasure, full of handwritten and meticulously typed recipes, peppered with her... (more)
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  Languedoc Trilogy: Book 2

  Sepulchre

  by Kate Mosse

  From the author of the New York Times– bestselling novel Labyrinth comes another haunting tale of secrets, murder, and the occult set in both nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century France. In 1891, young Leonie Vernier and her brother Anatole arrive in the beautiful town of Rennes-les-Bains, in southwest France. They've come at the invitation of their widowed aunt, whose mountain estate, Domain... (more)
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  Cane River

  by Lalita Tademy

  Lalita Tademy was a corporate vice president at a Fortune(r) 500 company when she decided to give notice and embark upon an odyssey to uncover her family's past. Through her exhaustive research, she would find herself transported back to the early 1800s, to an isolated, close-knit rural community on Louisiana's Cane River. Here, Tademy takes historical fact and mingles it with fiction to weave a vivid account of... (more)
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  Red House

  Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England's Oldest Continuously Lived-in House

  by Sarah Messer

  In her critically acclaimed, ingenious memoir, Sarah Messer explores America’s fascination with history, family, and Great Houses. Her Massachusetts childhood home had sheltered the Hatch family for 325 years when her parents bought it in 1965. The will of the house’s original owner, Walter Hatch—which stipulated Red House was to be passed down, "never to be sold or mortgaged from my children and... (more)
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  Treasures from the Attic: The Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank's Family

  by Mirjam Pressler

  A lost treasure trove (6,000 documents) from her grandmother’s attic about Anne Frank and her family, now woven into a chronicle. An old lady dies in Basel, Switzerland. Her devoted daughter-in-law, Gertrude, steels herself to do what all families must in the aftermath of death—she heads upstairs to the attic to sort through the effects. But Helene Elias wasn’t just any old lady, and none could put a price on... (more)
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  The Red Garden

  by Alice Hoffman

  Hoffman brings us 200 years in the history of Blackwell, a small town in rural Massachusetts, in her insightful latest. The story opens with the arrival of the first settlers, among them a pragmatic English woman, Hallie, and her profligate, braggart husband, William. Hallie makes an immediate and intense connection to the wilderness, and the tragic severing of that connection results in the creation of the red... (more)
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  Ethel & Ernest

  by Raymond Briggs

  Poignant, funny, and utterly original, Ethel & Ernest is Raymond Briggs's loving depiction of his parents' lives from their chance first encounter in the 1920s until their deaths in the 1970s. Ethel and Ernest were solid members of the English working class, part of the generation that lived through the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century. They met during the Depression--she working as a maid,... (more)
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  Nigel Barnes: Book 2

  Blood Atonement

  by Dan Waddell

  Katie Drake was an affluent single mother living in Queen's Park - until someone cut her throat and tore out her tongue. Worse still, the killer has abducted her fourteen-year-old daughter, Naomi. Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster quickly sees chilling parallels with the disappearance of teenager Leonie Stamey three years earlier. With hopes fading of finding Naomi alive, he calls on genealogist Nigel Barnes... (more)
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  The Probable Future

  by Alice Hoffman

  Alice Hoffman’s most magical novel to date?three generations of extraordinary women are driven to unite in crisis and discover the rewards of reconciliation and love. Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people’s dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future—a future that she might not want to see. In The... (more)
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  The View from Castle Rock

  by Alice Munro

  A powerful new collection from one of our most beloved, admired, and honored writers. In stories that are more personal than any that she’s written before, Alice Munro pieces her family’s history into gloriously imagined fiction. A young boy is taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. In stories that... (more)
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  My Father's Secret War

  by Lucinda Franks

  In this moving and compelling memoir about parent and child, father and daughter, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, nearly impassive man she grew up with had in fact been a daring spy behind enemy lines in World War II. Sworn to secrecy, he began revealing details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life as he became afflicted with Alzheimer’s. His exploits... (more)