By Paul Auster
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

A single child born in 1947 experiences four parallel lifetimes poignantly marked by shifting family fortunes, athletic pursuits, friendships, sex, intellectual passions, and the same intriguing woman.

By Jami Attenberg
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

From a critically acclaimed New York Times best –selling author of The Middlesteins comes a novel of family secrets revealed in the heat of a New Orleans summer.

By Anne Tyler

Marrying quickly during World War II after falling in love at first sight, a mismatched couple discovers that their very different personalities and approaches to life are taking a toll on their lives, their relationship, and their family, in a compelling novel spanning three generations. Genres: Domestic Fiction; Family Saga; Historical Fiction; Modern Era

By Khaled Hosseini

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations.

By Lauren Willig

Feeling unfulfilled in the face of an imminent legal partnership and a broken engagement, Manhattan lawyer Clementine Evans learns of a long-buried family secret that leads her to the inner circles of World War I British society and the red hills of Kenya.

By Jennifer Haigh

This novel depicts life in postwar Pennsylvania through the struggles of one widow trying to raise five children.

By Elif Shafak

Turkish teen Asya is coming of age under the wing of her tattoo-parlor owner mother and her three aunts, befriending a cousin from America, and discovering a secret that links her family to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres.

By Pat Conroy
Recommended By John Shea, Library Page

“Living in Rome with his daughter, Jack McCall finds his grief following his wife’s suicide interrupted by the arrival of his sister-in-law and two friends seeking his help in tracking down a classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester (From the Publisher).”

By Barbara Taylor Bradford
Series House of Deravenel

Elizabeth Deravenel rises to become the most powerful managing director in the history of the Deravenel business empire, only to find herself surrounded by corporate intrigue, takeover threats, betrayal, and scandal as she must make a choice between love and duty.

By Roopa Farooki

A Bangladeshi-Pakistani family whose penchant for telling lies shapes the destinies of every member.

By Jamie Brenner
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Returning with her mother to her parents’ North Fork Long Island winery, college-age Sadie discovers that her Grandma Vivian once ran a “trashy” book club and decides to reinstate it as a way to reconnect the family.

By Ann Packer
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When their troubled youngest sibling returns, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, find their lives disrupted in ways they could have never imagined as they each tell their story that is interwoven with portraits of their family at crucial points in their history.

By Jeffrey Archer

This sprawling and intricately plotted multigenerational family saga starts with Harry Clifton, a boy of mysterious parentage but much ambition, working on the docks in Bristol, England in 1919. This semiautobiographical story continues through 100 years of history, into the 21st century, from multiple points of view. The series offers colorful characters, mystery, plenty of questionable decision making, and a contested family fortune.

By Lisa Scottoline
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“Rebalancing her life and career after a painful divorce, pediatrician Jill learns that her ex has died from an alleged overdose that her former stepdaughter believes was actually murder…. (From the Publisher).”

By Ann Patchett
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

A five–decade saga tracing the impact of an act of infidelity on the parents and children of two Southern California families traces their shared summers in Virginia and the disillusionment that shapes their lasting bond.

By Abraham Verghese
Recommended By Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk

Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.

By Jonathan Lethem

A multigenerational saga focuses on two extraordinary women including tyrannical Communist Rose, who terrorizes her neighborhood with her absolute beliefs; and her brilliant but willful daughter, Miriam, who flees her mother's suffocating influence to embrace the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village.

By Ann Patchett
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A tale set over the course of five decades traces a young man’s rise from poverty to wealth and back again as his prospects center around his family’s lavish Philadelphia estate. By the award–winning author of Commonwealth.

By John Steinbeck

he Trasks and the Hamiltons live and work together in Salinas during the early 20th century.

By Ken Follett
Series Century Trilogy
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

A conclusion to the epic trilogy continues the experiences of five intertwined international families as they confront the social, political and economic turmoil of the second half on the 20th century.

By Christie Hodgen
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

“Mary Murphy searches for identity and purpose as she tells the story of her erratic childhood, her runaway sister, and the histories of people with whom she's crossed paths (From the Publisher).”

By Ken Follett
Series Century Trilogy
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian, John Shea, Library Page

Follows the fates of five interrelated families - American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh - as they move through the dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

By Ann-Marie MacDonald

The story of a jinxed family, a catalog of rape, incest and death. James Piper abuses his daughter, atones by sending her to New York to study singing while he goes to war, she returns pregnant, dies in childbirth when her mother opens her to save her twins. One of the twins dies, mother commits suicide, the second twin contracts polio while being baptized in a creek by an aunt, the aunt is raped by James. A first novel set in Nova Scotia early this century.

By Mario Puzo

The story opens with Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia manipulating papal elections in 1492 to become the new Pope Alexander. Determined to establish a family dynasty, he begins ruthlessly eliminating rivals and marrying his children into alliances with the offspring of noble families of France and Spain.

By Allegra Goodman

Told through weddings, deaths, academic conferences, and dreams, the uniquely humorous story of three generations of Markowitzes is revealed, creating a familial world of conflict, confusion, and love.

By Lynn Steger Strong

A group of siblings and their spouses gather for Christmas in upstate New York to try decide through rising tensions and old hurts what to do with the house their recently deceased mother has left them.

By Karen White

Dr. Kate Schuyler finds herself drawn into a mystery involving three generations of her family when Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought into the private Manhattan hospital where she works.

By John Galsworthy

This begins the famous saga of a British upper-middle class family, the family patriarch Soames, artist Jolyon, the alluring Irene and others.

By Anne Tyler
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian, Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

Follows the Garrett family from 1959 onward as they discover that their actions advance across decades and ripple through generations, in the new novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Breathing Lessons.

By Marilynne Robinson
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.

By Mario Puzo
Series Godfather Trilogy

Puzo pulls us inside the violent society of the Mafia and its gang wars. The leader, Vito Corleone, is the Godfather. He is a benevolent despot who stops at nothing to gain and hold power. His command post is a fortress on Long Island from which he presides over a vast underground empire that includes the rackets, gambling, bookmaking, and unions. His influence runs through all levels of American society, from the cop on the beat to the nation's mighty.

By Alex George
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

The Meisenheimer family struggle to find their place among the colorful residents of their new American hometown, including a giant teenage boy, a pretty schoolteacher whose lessons consist of more than just music and a spiteful, bicycle-riding dwarf.

By Jennifer Robson
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian, Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

From the internationally bestselling author of Somewhere in France comes an enthralling historical novel about one of the most famous wedding dresses of the twentieth century—Queen Elizabeth’s wedding gown—and the fascinating women who made it.

By Brenda Janowitz
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

The iconic wedding dress of Grace Kelly inspires three generations of women to forge their own paths, including a Parisian atelier who is hired to sew a look-alike gown before confronting an impossible choice.

By Yaa Gyasi
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Two half–sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in eighteenth–century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations.

By Grant Ginder
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

A college professor's idyllic life is shattered by her husband's infidelity and her nearly adult son's recklessness, prompting a visit to the beautiful Greek isles, where she reconnects with the past while trying to heal her family.

By Catherine Banner
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Four generations of women on a Mediterranean island fight to safeguard their family against the forces of history and bitterness that divide them from World War I through the 2008 recession.

By Valerie Anand

In fifteenth-century England, Richard Lanyon, who had sacrificed the happiness of his own family to become a landowner, finds he can no longer live with the guilt of his past, while his son, agreeing to an arranged marriage, harbors his own lost dreams.

By Margaret Dilloway
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

The story of Shoko, a Japanese woman who married an American GI, and her grown daughter, Sue, a divorced mother whose life as an American housewife hasn't been what she'd expected.

By Howard Fast
Series Lavette Family

In this first novel of an epic family saga recounting the rise of a poor fisherman's son from the cataclysmic depths of the San Francisco earthquake to become the head of a powerful shipping empire. He will risk all for a forbidden love.

By Chloe Benjamin

Sneaking out to get readings from a traveling psychic reputed to be able to tell customers when they will die, four adolescent siblings from New York City's Lower East Side embark on five decades of experiences shaped by their determination to control fate.

By Judy Blume
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

A novel inspired by a series of passenger airplane crashes that occurred in 1951 and 1952. New Jersey reimagines the impact of the tragedies on three generations of families, friends and strangers.

By Zoraida Córdova
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Seven years after their matriarch Orquidea passed away, blessing them with her special gifts, the Montoya family journeys to Ecuador to uncover the truth behind their inheritance to stop a hidden figure from killing off Orquidea’s line one-by-one.

By Rosie Thomas

In 1941, newlywed Nerys Watkins accompanies her husband to a missionary posting in the exotic lakeside city of Srinagar.

By Shirley Ann Grau

The relationship of Will Howland with Margaret Carmichael, his black housekeeper and mistress, is exposed when their granddaughter marries a segregationist with political ambitions, in a novel about racism, persecution, and rage.

By Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, February 25, 2014. 1:30 PM.

The story of a woman whose gift for flowers helps her change the lives of others even as she struggles to overcome her own past.

By John Irving

In a story spanning five decades, a twelve–year–old boy in New Hampshire mistakes the constable's girlfriend for a bear, leading to an unfortunate accident that forces the boy and his father to become fugitives pursued by the constable.

By Belva Plain

Two sisters separated by adoption and a romantic betrayal emigrate to America from Berlin after their parents fall victim to the Nazis.

By Brenda Janowitz
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

When their late mother's long–lost eleven–carat ring, which looks just like the diamond Richard Burton gifted Liz Taylor, unexpectedly resurfaces decades later, three siblings discover a secret that challenges everything they thought they knew about their parents' epic love.

By Amy Franklin-Willis
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

"After losing her twin to a drowning accident and his wife to divorce, Zeke Cooper leaves his mother and two daughters behind in Tennessee and travels to Virginia horse country, where he considers his responsibility to repair his fractured family (From the Publisher)."