As we ring in the holiday season, WFWA is celebrating women’s fiction titles that showcase the ups and downs and delights of family stories. Whether the saga continues across generations and timelines or is rooted in the present, the drama, love and secrets will keep you glued to the page.
Cave of Secrets by Lynne Golodner
On a rainy hike by Loch Lomond, Eve Waldman stumbles upon a perfectly preserved journal in a hidden cave. The time-worn lettering details the illicit affair of two Jewish lovers that sent a shiver of shame through a Scottish family — and echoes down the bloodlines.
Born of Highland aristocracy, Mac Monteith prefers to spend his days behind the bar of the family pub, rather than live the life his parents desired for him. Then Eve walks through the door, stirring more than Mac’s long-dormant heart.
When Eve traces the cave documents to the Monteith line, scandals and secrets spill out from all sides. Eve remains committed to the truth, but when being truthful means hurting the man she loves, she is forced to make a bigger choice: righting the wrongs of the past, or building the future she’s yearned for.
A contemporary romance with hints of magical realism, Cave of Secrets is about family heritage, intergenerational trauma, and finding the courage to be honest with ourselves — and those who love us.
This Isn’t Everything You Are by J. Marie Rundquist
When a child gets seriously injured on a school field trip, Lizzie loses not only her job and apartment, but most of her friends. She has a choice: face the consequences or hide. She chooses refuge with her brother, Justin. Except consequences can’t be avoided forever, and the incident at work causes Lizzie’s past to bubble up and uncover a long-buried truth about the accident that claimed the lives of their mother and sister twenty-five years ago.
Justin is happy to offer Lizzie a fresh start by having her move in with him. But as Lizzie cobbles together a new life forward, Justin’s starts to fall apart. Turbulence hits him at work when already challenging colleagues–who have never understood his autistic traits–become adversarial after his recent promotion, his best friend disappears for days at a time, and unwanted, long-repressed memories begin to resurface.
As Lizzie and Justin’s lives collide, they must face a deeply held secret and a hidden promise. Both will open questions of loyalty, forgiveness, and what it means to be family.
A Thousand Tiny Stitches by Stephanie Claypool
After a hit-and-run driver kills Lily’s daughter and son-in-law, she is left with unspeakable grief, custody of her eight-year-old granddaughter Emma, and an impossible wish: to fulfill her daughter’s dream of opening a quilt shop in the old house in their small Western Pennsylvania town.
The house is in shambles, coated with years of grime, but Lily, unable to afford contractors on her late husband’s pension, tackles the job herself. As Emma’s emotional struggles deepen, the old house presents a barrage of costly obstacles. Worse, when Lily discovers a squatter living on the property, she fears for their safety. Only her unwavering belief that the shop is the best way to build a new life for herself and Emma keeps Lily pushing forward.
But not everyone in town is rooting for Lily’s success, and the line between helper and hinderer isn’t always clear, forcing Lily to make sacrifices she never imagined. She will need to prove it isn’t the patchwork that makes a quilt but the thousands of tiny stitches that bind the layers—and maybe hold a family together.
Everything We Thought Was True by Lisa Montanaro
A secret that forever shapes a family…
New York, 1983: When an argument erupts during dinner and Teresa Antinori, a typically docile wife and mother, hurls plates filled with pasta e piselli at her husband, Frank—the future of their Italian American family is changed forever. Frank has found a safe harbor with Teresa, but longs to truly be himself, while Teresa struggles with the startling discovery that her husband is gay and living a lie.
Los Angeles 2015: Thirty-two years later, their daughter Lena is still picking up the pieces. When her father calls with unexpected news, it throws her right back into her least favorite place—the past. Lena is torn between supporting her father and her enduring loyalty to her mother, who once demanded secrecy at all costs.
Told in alternating points of view—Frank and Teresa in the past, and Lena in the present—Everything We Thought Was True is the story of a family trying to reconcile their past, understand the secret at the heart of the family’s rupture, and embrace the future. Brimming with love and loss, heartache and hope, this multigenerational family saga weaves a tapestry of identity, healing, and forgiveness.
The Bent Tree Path, Book One: A Secret Trail of Tears by Joan T. Warren
Becca and Lena live in two eras—one during the 1970s through the 80s’ recovery movement, the other during World War I and the Great Depression.
The 1920s roared nearby, but not in, Lena Burriss. Bucolic farm life hadn’t prepared her for Clinton Smith. She must leave him to save her children. Time was not on her side—neither were finances, cultural norms, law, nor the Great Depression. Her Cherokee heritage, nearly lost after the Indian Removal, and associations with influential women in government, could help–but enough? In time?
Jump forward fifty years. Becca, a lost teen in a lost family, becomes a single mother at fifteen. Though love- and peace-seeking, she must fight—to create a better life for her child—without a clue of forces working within and around her to keep them ensnared.
How do these two lives intersect? What will it take to break the cycle?
Find Me in California by Kerry Lonsdale
An achingly romantic novel about chance meetings, buried secrets, and the multiple facets of love and family bonds by Wall Street Journal bestselling author Kerry Lonsdale.
Raised by her fiercely passionate and free-spirited grandmother, Julia Hope has never gone without love. But as she tends to her only living relative during her final days, Julia struggles to overcome her fear of being alone.
A thousand miles away, Matt Gatlin has managed to avoid the coldhearted grandmother with whom he once lived. But after twelve years of her being blessedly out of sight, she needs him. His resentments still raw, Matt packs up his car and reluctantly heads to California to confront a bitter past he thought was long gone.
Over the next six days, Julia’s and Matt’s fates intersect. An old diary exposes the tragedy of a long-lost love. A history of secrets in two families comes to light. And on a lonely back road, Matt picks up an unusual yet captivating hitchhiker with a secret of her own.
The Other Sister by Pat Valdata
The Other Sister is a vivid and richly detailed story of the immigrant experience in America. Pat Valdata follows three generations of sisters through poverty and prosperity, and lets us share their triumphs and heartbreak. It is beautiful, funny, sad and very readable. –Mary Lee Bragg, author of Shooting Angels
Ladies’ Day by Lisa Williams Kline
Fifteen years after her troubled daughter Julie ran away from home, Beth Sawyer stumbles across a newspaper photograph of an up-and-coming teen golfer, who not only shares her last name, but also looks just like her daughter. Sky Sawyer couldn’t possibly be her granddaughter—or could she? With her sort-of-functional life sinking into a full-on collapse—and let’s not get started on her soon-to-be-married ex-husband—Beth meets Barry, a fellow golfer who she accidentally hits with her golf ball. Will he take her to court or to dinner?
When Sky Sawyer joins her high school golf team, she hopes that the mother she thought dead may still be alive and seek her out at the championship tournament. But when she discovers that the man who raised her is not her father and a woman claiming to be her long-lost grandmother appears, her world falls apart.
With Beth and Sky fighting to gain what they both had lost, can they finally get a second chance at a happily ever after?
